Above is a tee we designed for one of the MindGames teams my partners and I coach. The concept is both true and a lie. Flip the arrows and you'll see real, Jamesian "Truth." I should be ashamed foisting such naive thinking on 8th graders.

Ex-Aide Says He’s Lost Faith in Bush - New York Times

Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced.

In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,” he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in.”

In speaking out, Mr. Dowd became the first member of Mr. Bush’s inner circle to break so publicly with him

Rightist indignation - Washington Post

At a lunch recently at a downtown Washington hotel, Gold, 78, hands over the program, now an artifact of seemingly ancient history. He is trying to explain why it was so hard to write his new book, one whose title encapsulates what he now thinks of his onetime friends: "Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP." The two men at the top, he says, were men he knew pretty well -- or at least he thought he did.

"What I described there was the Cheney we all thought we knew," Gold says ruefully.

..."For all the Rove-built facade of his being a 'strong' chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times," Gold writes. "Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots."

Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. "A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control."

For Gold, Cheney brings to mind the adage of Swiss writer Madame de Stael, who wrote, "Men do not change, they unmask themselves." Cheney has a deep streak of paranoia and megalomania, Gold suggests -- but he says he did not see it at first.

Madame de Staël! Now there's a throwback--a woman ahead of her time and completely ahead of most of the men around her. One of the profoundest quotes I remember my dear departed mum speaking at me was Mme de Staël's: Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's. She followed up with Byron: Love is to man a thing apart, to woman all existence. (Chances are one ripped off the other - my bet is on Byron-the-stealer since his flows better and smacks of his good editing.)

Mom was giving me that little piece of wisdom because I sat on the parental couch, a 20-something simpleton, dumbfounded and thickheaded, recovering from being dumped by what I thought was the girl of my dreams because of my narrow view of what a relationship required.

I'm still stupid but not reprobate enuf that de Staël's words--and the concept underlying them--didn't stick with me. Eventually, I went looking for the 18th Century lady's other words. She's quite the aphorism factory. But the "Men do not change, they unmask themselves" really piqued my imagination. It "felt" true even at that naive point in my understanding. And it's really navigation advice as much as description. People are wholes before they are parts, dark and light. And parts alone are nothing with out purpose and some kind of guidance or leadership. But what kind of leadership? Where do the 'best practices' of that thing spring? Invariably, they are misinformed and malformed in early years learning of what the archetypes of leadership and relationship are about.

And what a mess.

Leadership is really counter to being noisy and glowering people into buying your schtick of your presumed desirable outcome for them. Leaders are mirrors of what we wish and dream as ourselves. And dreams are really ambition in search of practical skill, or, vice versa. They tell us what we need to hear, framing our hopes for us, reflecting back an image that's at once impossible and completely practical. The "impossible" comes from the place that says "Don't get your hopes up. Settle and survive." The 'practical' comes from a weirder place - individuals who fell prey to their hopes and found a way to make them real. For them, existing was impossible in a settling place. And the uncommon becomes convention. Doing the right thing becomes unconventinional which only imprints their leadership more deeply in those they need to rise up and lead themselves.

Departing Delta CEO Refusing Bonuses

Turning his back on a potentially lucrative payday, Delta Air Lines CEO Gerald Grinstein said Monday that he is refusing any stock, stock options or cash when the carrier emerges from bankruptcy.

Grinstein, who has led the United States' No. 3 airline since January 2004, said he wants Delta instead to invest what he would have gotten in post-bankruptcy bonuses, to be used for scholarships and emergency hardship assistance for Delta employees, families and retirees. Under a post-bankruptcy compensation plan unveiled Monday, Grinstein could have been expected to net about $10 million, including such bonuses, over about three years.

Delta hopes to exit bankruptcy in May. Grinstein, 74, who plans to retire this summer, said it wouldn't be right to take money intended as an incentive for future executive performance.

"I'm leaving, so it doesn't fit me," he said in an interview. Besides, he said, "Corporate pay packages have gotten out of control. It has become a salary derby out there."