I am getting sick of hearing this broken record.What you people do not seem to understand, is that in war time you have to have a different mindset if you want to be victorious.
What happens when the war is over, we've fought the good fight, and the increased laws/government powers are not taken off the books?
Say the war is over, say somebody gets into office, democrat or whatever, they decide that rather than go back to the way things were, they can perhaps use some of those new laws/powers to help themselves.
A good analogy would be re-districting, it's a mild tool that the parties use against each other every 10 years (and it is used against each other). Think about a party inheriting some laws and powers that are to deal with terrorists, and they get to define what terrorists are. They could use that against the other party. All of the sudden the playing field changes. FR might be considered a hotbed of radicals and extremists and could be banned (okay I'm stretching, but you know what I mean)