Blair’s memoir is full of moral rot
Re: “Tony Blair,” Beltway Confidential, Sept. 5
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new memoir, “A Journey,” is an odyssey into moral and political corruption. The book unwittingly explains why most of our democracies today are, in reality, thinly disguised totalitarian regimes.
Blair writes: “Politicians are obliged from time to time to conceal the full truth, to bend it and even distort it” in order to force their agenda on the people. He also talks of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein sharing “a common set of attitudes: indifference to human life [and] the justification of mass killing. …”
Nowhere in Blair’s book does he express any regret for his own policies that sanctioned and advanced the use of contraceptives, the practices of abortion and euthanasia, and the advancement of homosexuality. He also looks upon the illicit affairs of politicians, not with any moral disdain, but with a “fairly worldly eye.”
Blair makes it clear that his kind is the norm in governments throughout the “free” world. A sad state of affairs!
Walter Clarkson
Chicago
Crisis in education is worse than economy
Re: “Higher education bubble poised to burst,” Sept. 3
Michael Barone’s analysis of America’s higher education problem is on the mark, particularly in exposing the academic elite and bloated sinister dilemma: dumbing-down students, socialist indoctrination, and creating armies of young social justice activists.
Higher education did not simply abandon a coherent, content-rich general education curriculum. This was as intentional as anything could be. Indeed, students who manage to graduate from high school without being functionally illiterate and go on to college are the meat and potatoes for academics to dupe and consume.
The education crisis is far more dangerous to our free society than the current economic crisis. It’s a combined social, political, economic and education crisis that, if not corrected and overcome, will eventually enslave us with the tyranny of government. Alas, it has been planned and slowly carried out for a century.
Daniel B. Jeffs
Apple Valley, Calif.
Opponents use ignorance, fear to rail against mosque
Re: “Mosque debate is all about straw men,” Aug. 31
Thomas Sowell makes a valid distinction between having the right to do something (build the Islamic Center) and deciding to do it. What he seems to miss is that in deciding whether to do something unpopular, the reasons behind the unpopularity are important.
If a large number are against the center because they (wrongly) see terrorism and anti-Americanism every time they hear “Islam” or “Muslim,” then this unreasonable unfamiliarity, ignorance, fear, and/or hate should not determine the decision. By supporting the center against such opposition, sponsors are rightfully insisting that they do not fit the distorted picture that others wrongfully draw of them.
The 9/11 terrorists could not define Islam merely by saying that they acted in its name, any more than the Spanish inquisitors or the abortion doctor’s killer could define Christianity by their inhuman acts.
Gilbert Adams
Washington
