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>>People may say that Bush’s administration was trying to protect America, but if we accept that certain freedoms have to be given up for wartime reasons, and we are in a war without end, then we have, for all intents and purposes, permanently given up those freedoms.<<

That’s the problem in a nutshell. It was unwise to look at these issues in the context of “do we like and/or trust President Bush43” - the actual question is “do we give up constitutional protects because somebody in government says we ought to?”

I take it further - if we willingly gave up some Constitutional protections because Bush43 or Obama said we had to, would those protections be returned to us in the future. The answer is no. Governments do not willingly give up power once they get it, and we simply cannot risk the removal of those protections because some President tries to tell us we have to.

Bush and Congress put us in a bad position with the PATRIOT Act and everything associated with it, because I truly believe that there are administrations down the road who will try and use the war on terror (or some other war) against the American people.

It may not be now, it may not be 20 years from now, but it will happen. Just look at how many things were done by the government on a "temporary" basis in the early 1900s and how those things kept on growing and growing.