Squabbling between the generals and the White House will turn the best advice sour in a hurry, no matter what party or president, whether he is a celebrity or not, is in power.

Being committed to a half assed plan is better than being half assed about a great plan any day of the week when you're in a fight.

If we have to invent complicated methodologies to explain why we can ignore the things we can all see with our own eyes in order to make the parts of reality we are willing to accept adhere to some of the simplest principles of all, like the idea of "fairness" or "equality", its no wonder that most of the world, including our own citizenry, think that a lot of our public policy is the kind of bullshit snake oil salesmen used to sell.

Personally, I think the need to feel a sense of moral and intellectual superiority is behind these multi-pronged explanations that allow us to assert the logical equivalent of "2 = 4" with a straight face.

If we use logic when its expedient, and philosophical bluster when it isn't, then what are we doing?

I'd rather here the president say "we Americans know what's best for the rest of you (except China) ruffians and demagogues, so just shut the hell up and do it our way" than listen to the sappy line of bullshit he and every other commander in chief has peddled to the world.

I'm still not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

Check it out. I thought it was a damn good series. An excerpt from the intro is below:

I am approximately six feet tall – a little taller than the average American male, but not tall enough to really tower over a gathering of other adults. Every once in awhile, though, I find myself in a social situation where I am standing on a riser or a step or an incline that lifts me just two or three inches higher than my normal height. From the vantage point that someone six-two or six-three would have, the world looks entirely different. The people look different, as if I am getting to see another angle of who they are. Just that slight shift in my perspective lets me see, at least for a little while, what tall guys see when they look at the rest of us.

This is what is missing from the debate on race and the affect it is having on the presidential election - a comprehensive look at the perspectives of white people, including those who, despite similar political beliefs or party affiliation, are having a problem voting for Barack Obama. The punditocracy gives the topic lip service, jumping from the question of why this is a problem straight to their favorite labels – Soccer Mom, Walmart Mom, NASCAR Dad, Joe Six Pack, Ma and Pa Kettle, Evangelical voters, Values voters, Rural voters, Bubba voters – before spouting off a pat answer that assumes these voters are either in love with the idea of a black president, or ready to kill the first black president. But if black people, as we have been asserting for some time, aren’t monolithic, why should we believe anything different about white Americans?

So I started doing some research, even before the polls started to record the phenomena of white Democrats who could not fathom voting for a black man last week, just to see what COULD be going on with my white brethren. I ran into a very good sources, including one whose findings anchor this series, The Black Rage In The White Mind, by Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki. Their study categorized white racial thinking in four ways:

Racial comity and understanding

Multi-dimensional conceptual thinking – can hold positive and negative views and acknowledge that having varied interests do not make black and white interests mutually exclusive.

Racial ambivalence

A complicated combination of assumptions, misinformation, emotional needs, experiences and personality traits that all bear on a white person’s thinking about race. Can sometimes allow him to deny the existence of racism.

Racial animosity

Persistent pathological biases that include stereotyping, denial, political rejection, demonization and fearful, angry emotions. Can include the extent to which white people see themselves as having group interests that conflict with those of blacks.

Racist

Believe blacks share such homogeneously negative characteristics that they must be an inferior rank of human against whom discrimination is inevitable and justifiable.

To really have a chance at understanding the origin and motivations of these four different points of view, we’ve got to back up a bit and look at how we process the information we receive. One thing that all of these states of mind have in common are the basic cognitive functions of perception - attention and emotion - which are functions essential to an individual's knowledge of the world and themselves.

Hopefully, this exploration of racial thinking can utilize the traditional building blocks of perception to provide a clearer picture of how white Americans tend to think when they think about race.