Exhibit-A of the polio fallacy.
So what happens when a socialist Dim gets in office in the comming decades? It's all a slippery slope and you never see the damage done by incrementalism until it's too late. Did income taxes decline or go away after they were introduced back 70-80 years ago?
True enough. If you watch the Sensebrenner-chaired PA hearing called by the Dems last Friday, though, the results of incrementalism are painfully obvious: immigration lawyers moaning and groaning about the rights of illegals; Zogby lecturing Congress on our "image" in the Arab world; wholesale slandering of the military in its handling of Islamic murderers; condemnation of profiling Muslims; and, of course, laments about the rights of vaguely anonymous librarians across the country.
It's incrementalism all right -- little by little, 9/11, and all the Muslim bloodbaths before and since, have been forgotten.
Exhibit-A of the polio fallacy.
The Patriot act is not incremental. Nor were the even more stringent limits on freedom put on us during WWII. But they were removed after the war. The key here is to have to have the act come up for vote every five years, and not make it permanent.
Although your statement is true and a valid caution, it makes me think you know the media version of the Patriot Act, not the real version. No freedoms were lost. The courts were still required for approval of taps, etc. It basically just brought existing laws into the present by accounting for cell phones, the internet, and such.