[unclebucknasty]

>The OP implied that this was different-- as in an actual declaration of war. The cold war was never declared, am I right?

Exactly. And, perhaps more importantly, neither was the Cold War used to justify so many actions that would only be allowable in actual war time.

[dragonwriter]

> Exactly. And, perhaps more importantly, neither was the Cold War used to justify so many actions that would only be allowable in actual war time.

Actually, it was. In fact, many of things that are happening now and are the focus of that complaint were also done during the Cold War, to the point when in one of the brief moments of reactions against those extremes at the end of the Nixon/Vietnam era where the Cold War excesses had reached a perceived (local, at least) maximum, attempts were made to put legal limits on them in. E.g., the War Powers Resolution and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

[unclebucknasty]

I knew someone would say that.

Let's explicitly narrow it to domestic actions (i.e., the context of this discussion).

Also, the phrase I used "so many actions".

That is, my post was not intended to assert that war powers had never been abused in the past.

[dragonwriter]

> Let's explicitly narrow it to domestic actions (i.e., the context of this discussion).

You mean, like the use of the state of national threat to justify intrusive unrestrained domestic surveillance using the tools of foreign intelligence surveillance during the Cold War, to which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was a response (a response whose partial undoing in the FISA Amendments Act is one of the focal points of outrage in the recent complaints about domestic abuses justified by the "permanent war".)

Yeah, GP is still true when you limit it to domestic actions.

> Also, the phrase I used "so many actions".

If you want to support your claim with specifics, go ahead, but right now all I see is waving around generalities, and responding to the specifics raised in opposition with more generalities.

[unclebucknasty]

Specifics? Are you really asking me to enumerate them here?

How about you just start by reading the Patriot Act.