The fact that they got away with it -- and made it look so easy -- just lays out a blueprint for future depredations.  One time when Bush some adviser had the temerity to question a Bush plan, referencing the Constitution, Bush snapped "the Constitution's just a goddam piece of paper!"  

You know what?  Bush is right.  He's right if people in power don't respect our founding documents and our founding principles.  He's right if the public is too apathetic, too timid, or too ignorant to understand the centrality of Constitutional rights and liberties, the indispensable nature of the checks and balances keeping any one of the three branches of government from overreaching the others, the bedrock principles of the rule of law and respect for orderly processes.  

This Bush-Cheney cabal -- these corrupt, corner-cutting, mendacious, cruel, insensitive, bloodthirsty warmongers --have ravaged our Constitutional system, looted our treasury, sent our young warriors to slaughter without end in sight, and made this once-proud nation's flag an emblem of shame and perfidy.

I hope America can still be saved, but I think it will be years -- decades, even -- to set right what evil this monstrous regime has wrought.  And every step of the way towards recovery, we'll have to watch oh so carefully, and worry, lest someone else should come along who learned the Bush-Cheney lessons and wants to apply them all over again.

An American dictatorship was the stuff of fiction a few short years ago.  Now, I have to wonder . . .