Because a lot of people in the media seem to have forgotten, and far too many Democrat partisans don't seem to care anymore, here's a brief reminder about what we're really talking about when there's a bunch of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the NSA's surveillance programs.

I wanted to take a couple of days to really digest this issue before I wrote about it (and I've been nearly buried by a project at work that's demanding a lot of time and attention), and unsurprisingly the media and some idiots on the left have made it clear that they just don't think that terrorism is a big deal. For them, we need to show them this again.

The USA Today article that started this whole brouhaha was simply a rehash of a New York Times article from last year. [Tinfoil hat on] The Times, in an effort to hide the Bush administration's dastardly doings, published their story on Dec. 24. Apparently a bunch of right-wing theocrats have some sort of ritual around that time, so it wasn't widely noted in the media. [Tinfoil hat off]

Excited by the fact that their scoop had benefited USA Today and not themselves, the New York Times downplayed their five-month head start on the story and claimed that "the USA Today article on Thursday went further" than their original reporting had. Why? Because USA Today discovered that the NSA was putting all of these phone records in a "database" and not a series of numbered shoeboxes as had been previously reported.

The bottom line is that this NSA program was perfectly legal. It doesn't require a court order to get what is nothing more than anonymous billing data on phone calls.

For those of you who don't understand what this database is for, let me present you with a very realistic hypothetical. The U.S. captures al Qaeda's latest No. 2 man and (surprise!) he has a cell phone. The military transmits the phone number to the NSA and they boot up their database and are able to find not only what numbers in the U.S. called that number or were called by that number, but also all the other calls made by those U.S.-based numbers -- almost instantaneously. At that point, the NSA would have to get a court warrant to get the names and addresses of all of those phones.

Without this program, the NSA would have to try to get records from the phone companies after the fact -- possibly delaying and preventing the capture of terrorists in the U.S. And how long do phone companies keep these detailed records for anyway? Six months? A year? What if one of the terrorist cells went silent for a year before their attack? Would the phone company have records dating back two years? Three?

That's what this is all about. They aren't listening in to find out your mother's secret fudge recipe.

Qwest Communications is the only Baby Bell that refused to participate in the NSA program, which tells us two things: Qwest will become the preferred telecommunications company of U.S.-based terrorists; and the next blue-ribbon commission that is convened after the next major terrorist attack will likely be pointing the finger at Qwest. Of course, the kicker is that the Qwest chairman that is earning praise for "protecting his customers privacy rights" is also under indictment for insider trading.

Initial polling shows that the American people largely "get" it. More recent polling shows slightly smaller numbers, but we'll see what kind of hysterial the media can bring to bear on the issue as the weeks roll by.

As I was mulling this story over for the past couple of days, I heard a charge from one of the talking heads that the reasons why so many Republicans seemed so unconcerned with the NSA programs was a partisan one -- they'd be outraged if it were a President Clinton (Bill or Hillary) pulling this sort of thing.

Initially, this argument swayed me somewhat as I considered whether or not I would trust a president who had lied under oath to a grand jury and had a political underling improperly collect more than 1,000 FBI files of Republicans with these sorts of NSA programs.

After mulling on it for awhile, I came to two conclusions. First, I probably wouldn't have trusted that Slick Willy was only using this data for national security purposes (see the Barrett Report). Second, when the Echelon program was revealed in 2000, I wasn't the least bit outraged about it.

It's the Echelon program that convinced me that, in this case, I was innocent of the partisanship charge. Echelon is much more intrusive than anything the NSA under the Bush administration has been charged with doing.

What would it take me to get on my high horse about threats to civil liberties? Well, if the media -- or anyone else -- uncovers the Bush administration illegally wiretapping their political opponents, then that's over the line -- and ground for impeachment.

What we've seen thus far are reasonable, measured programs that do a good job balancing civil liberties and security in a time of war.