Bullies refuse to play by any rule other than the stacked deck, a seemingly no loss situation without accountability.  This is the world that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush know intimately.

When a deck is stacked the bully beneficiaries can get away with murder.  Once again, this is a terrain with which the sordid duo of Cheney and Bush are highly familiar.  

After all, once you have developed a penchant for rigging elections without being held accountable, the arrogant glow that follows is justifiable and anticipated, as is the escalation of conduct extending to the ultimate trashing of the U.S. Constitution.

In order for Cheney and Bush to succeed to this degree it was necessary for real opposition to vanish in the political system.  Candidates willing to challenge them were ridiculed by the mainstream corporate media as unelectable and too far to the left to capture the votes of independents and swing Democrats.