Free Republic

If you asked most Americans today what the biggest threat to our future prosperity is you would get answers like competition from abroad, outsourcing, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the wave of illegal immigration swamping the labor market. Those answers would be wrong. In fact, the biggest threat to Americas’ continued prosperity is the growing disquiet about our economic prospects in the face of those challenges, and the economic populism that is bursting out in response to these fears. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has distilled those fears into the central message of his campaign, but echoes of his message...

Two major public statements, coming less than a week apart, nicely capture the confusion besetting U.S. foreign policy these days. The first is the report of the Iraq Study Group, released on Dec. 6. In good old-fashioned "realist" style, the report offers nothing about how to promote democracy and human rights in the Middle East, focusing instead on the single-minded, amoral pursuit of the U.S. national interest. Just five days later, outgoing U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan delivered his valedictory address, imploring Americans to uphold human rights and the rule of law in prosecuting the war on terrorism -- idealism...