To the Journal editor:

Today before the world I am ashamed to call myself an American.

I’ve long since reconciled with the flaws in this American enterprise because I convinced myself that the fundamental values and principles of decency and respect held by the men and women we elect will ultimately override and diminish those flaws.

(Recently) though, as I watched and heard the president and vice president of these United States berate and demean the president of another country, I lost all of what little faith I had left in this American experiment to work.

A colleague in democracy, Volodymir Zelenskyy, who had every right to be accorded the basic sensitivity and respect of a visiting dignitary was humiliated and confronted in one of the most egregious displays of hubris and disrespect imaginable at the highest levels of diplomacy

He appeared before our two highest representatives of state and government as a man in trouble and fighting for the very life of his country, hat in hand, so to speak, only to be pilloried and roundly lectured to like a five-year-old child!

It was such despicable behavior in the Oval Office as to be beyond the pale!

The far-reaching implications of spectacle at home and abroad are indeed awful to contemplate.