...Or would you rather wait until it's "outside your front door?"

Nick Berg owned a business in suburban Philadelphia. His dad, his brother and his sister live in the Philadelphia area. He was a contractor who went to Iraq to help out in the rebuilding of the infrastructure of that war-torn nation.

Nick Berg's face was seen today on a web-site known to belong to Al Qaeda. Berg was sitting in front of a group of masked thugs, who forced him to give his name, then promptly decapitated him.

Perky Katie Couric keeps trying to tell us how evil the Bush Administration is every morning; Snotty Peter Jennings makes sure you know the same thing as you eat dinner each evening.

Nancy Pelosi screeches the same thing with all the presence of a mynah bird. John "Ketchup Boy" Kerry fusses about it -- at least between sessions of bitching about how pundits, commentators and other politicians need to leave his wife alone (when I hear Ketchup Boy try to play tough, I keep seeing Robert Conrad from the old Eveready commercials -- you remember the ones, with the battery on his shoulder, daring you to knock it off).

But none of them will reserve the same level or intensity of anger for Nick Berg's life.

Oh, we'll hear Al Franken and Whoopi Goldberg make light of Berg's death all over the place; we'll see postings from Democratic Underground and retardedly scrawled cartoons from Ted Rall insist that Berg deserved what he got because he worked for "eeeeevil" Halliburton or some other defense contracting firm -- after all, if he's associated with the defense industry in any way, shape or form, he's gotta be evil too, right?

My God, a man's life was taken by barbaric animals! Animals who have no concept of the meaning of the words "honor" or "integrity." No idea what "freedom" really means. "Truth" and "justice" are just some misbegotten notion to them.

And we're left with people like Jesse Jackson insisting that since a few prisoners in custody were harassed by their jailers that we are all of a sudden worse than the cretins who took Nick Berg's life.

Hand-wringers like Tom Daschle will show up on the Sunday morning talking head shows to try to tell us that we deserve anything we get, because we, as a nation, didn't do what the United Nations wanted us to do; because we didn't do what the Democrats on the Hill and across the nation wanted us to do.

Oh, I know -- you'll want to lay the blame for his death at President Bush's feet.

President Bush didn't stand over Nick Berg with a mask on. Donald Rumsfeld didn't raise a large knife over Berg's head and cut it off -- mind you, yelling "Allah Akbar" in the process. The Republican Party didn't plaster this on their web site, claiming that this fate awaited all other Americans.

But the liberals in this nation are going to place the blame squarely at the feet of those of us on the conservative side of the fence. "If we hadn't gone to war in the first place, none of this would have happened," is what they'll say.

If we hadn't gone to war, would Washington or New York or Los Angeles be a smoking crater right now? Huh?

A new CNN survey touted on the news this morning, indicates that more than 50% of Americans believe that the Iraqi war was not "worth it." How many more Americans' deaths will it take before it becomes worth it?

To hear John Kerry tell it, we would do better to pick up our toys and go home; a veritable modern-day Monroe Doctrine, if you will. Are you ready to wall off America from the rest of the world? Are you ready for the bad guys to come knocking on your door?

After all, the city council in Hamtrammack, MI has already given the OK for the Islamic Call to Prayer to be pronounced on loudspeakers in that sleepy little Detroit suburb. How much longer will it be before the city council in Hamtrammack "encourages" people to go to the mosque on a daily basis?

Bill Cosby unwittingly came up with the best analogy to this in his classic routine, Lights Out: "It's in your home state...[bump-bump, bump-bump]...It's outside your front door...[bump-bump, bump-bump]...and it's going to eat you up!"

You want to stop it now? Or wait until it's "outside your front door?" [bump-bump, bump-bump]

Is that what you're concerned about?

The level of sovereignty that the Iraqi interim government will have?

The July turnover is just another step on the long road to representative government for them

Right, it's not sovereignty. Anyone who describes what will happen on June 30th as returning sovereignty to the Iraqi's is deliberately trying to misinform, or they are misinformed themselves.

Your statement "Our democracy works because, first and foremost, we self-govern, a product of our Judeo-Christian heritage.", holds much truth, but I'd say first and foremost our democracy works because democracy was sought.

Unfortunate comparisons have been made between the liberation of European countries from WWII German occupation forces and the current "liberation" of Iraq. The liberation of European countries restored self-government to peoples that had it prior to German occupation. They knew, and loved what was being restored. Once liberated, these people joined in every aspect of our efforts to defeat the enemy. We no longer had to seek German collaborators. The people we liberated surrendered them to us.

The same cannot be said of Iraq. Efforts to defeat the enemy are absent the general population. Even the efforts of Iraqi police and defense forces might be absent if not for the financial gain offered by our government.

The Iraqis have never known democracy, never sought democracy, and may not be inclined toward democracy. The desire to self govern must come from within the leaders of a nation. In Islamic countries will only be achieved by way of leading clerics giving their blessings to such a concept. The clerics are comparable in stature to the Emperor of Japan, the religious figurehead of the Japanese Empire. When Hirohito subjugated himself to our insistence for a democratic post war Japan, the Japanese population followed without resistance.

Without such backing from Islamic clerics, the religious figureheads of Iraq, our efforts to instill democratic values upon the Iraqi population are destined to fail.

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