To the editor:

The editorial and letters page in the Friday paper was tied together neatly: Leslie and Jennie Dienes’ letter to Public Forum clearly expresses that Kansas native and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has failed to defend one of “his” employees and cursed a reporter. You have nicely tied that to national writer David Ignatius’ editorial on the same page. He points out that “the former congressman’s intimidating anger is so well-known back in his native Kansas that during his 2014 reelection campaign, supporters of his opponents began wearing stickers that said ‘Mike bullied me.'” Wow! I didn’t know that! (And Pompeo is the person Kansas Republicans were touting as the preferable candidate to Kris Kobach?)

Where are we, folks? Some yearn for a mythical lost past when men who thought they were brilliant made the country great. No, we are all flawed, including Pompeo and the Don. We Americans cannot depend on them to make all our decisions for us. They will make wrong decisions if they do not listen to experienced people and trust them. That’s a guarantee! How many times in your life have you recognized that your boss was willfully barging ahead and you and fellow employees knew that his decision would cause problems for the company? I submit two Americas; one is the old one that assumed that we were great only because we had perfect strong leaders. Let’s call for the other America that knows the strongest solutions come from combined effort. In old Kansas it took a lot of people working together to raise a barn.

Gus McClelland,

Lawrence