Open Season on Harpists Begins Today

Today is the first practice session with my harp partner, Carla, as we gear up for Christmas performances. It remains to be seen whether the debilitating stage fright that descended upon me last year will reappear this year. After 30 years of performing one thing or another - piano or voice - and then a successful first Christmas season on the harp, I'm not sure what happened last year, in my second season. Maybe 100% memorization of the music will help. I hope so. There's not much point in playing the harp if you cannot play in front of others, except to use it as a form of private torture or to calm fractious dogs in my living room (it always makes them immediately sleepy).

Meanwhile, what's in the news today other than John Edwards' big televangelist moment, promising John Kerry could make the wheelchair-bound walk if he was elected president. Just when you thought there was nothing Kedwards wouldn't say to get elected, they go even lower than that!

On the subject of the violence being inflicted against Bush-Cheney campaign offices and volunteers and voters, Michelle Malkin wonders how many hate crimes it takes before the MSM spots a trend?

Hello, reporters? Is anybody home? Is it my imagination, or do I hear pins dropping in the grievance corners of America's otherwise victim-friendly newsrooms?

For the past several weeks, the Internet has been buzzing with story after story of election-related mayhem aimed at Bush/Cheney supporters. Some have downplayed the incidents as run-of-the-mill pranks. Others claim that "both sides are doing it" equally.

Yes, both Democratic and Republican signs have been torn. Yes, there has been juvenile behavior on both sides. But left-wing activists have escalated their campaign attacks to a seemingly unprecedented level. We have gone from simple mischief to open-season malice. And the supposedly objective reporters who are always so willing to connect the dots to expose the politics of hate are now whistling past the smashed windows and flaming signs and bullet holes.

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The Washington Post takes a tortured look at Kerry's management style. I say tortured because Kerry obviously substitutes information for core beliefs instead of measuring information against core beliefs, and the Post had to get into all kinds of contortionist positions to find positive ways to portray this. It's an interesting read. Here's the part of his modus operandi I'll bet a certain billionairess regrets:

He has three dozen domestic policy councils, two dozen foreign policy groups, an expanding corps of consultants, and many informal advisers he calls -- about 15 per night -- before going to bed.

I'm coming to bed, honey, but I just have a dozen more phone calls to make!

Here's another part that illustrates the difference between a debater and a leader:

Before setting a course of action, he regularly engages aides and friends in long discussion and argument, often playing devil's advocate to probe for weaknesses and, if he finds them, insisting on more information until he believes he can argue all options equally well.

It is an approach that wears down even loyal lieutenants, particularly when choices seem obvious, but one they say is built into the way Kerry operates.

I get a sense of deja vu from all this. Bill Clinton was also a sponge for data and a late-into-the-night debater. I don't think we as a nation gained much from that, but Al Qaeda and the other Islamofascist terrorists gained an eight-year lead in their war against civilization.

If you're going to go to war against the United States, which they did, it's better to have a sponge in the Oval Office than someone who is going to come and drop a daisycutter down the mouth of your cave. The terrorists must be sweating this election as much as we are.

All in all though, if you're analyzing John Kerry, it's better to focus on his management style, no matter how flawed, than to focus on his attempts to pander to outdoorsmen.

Geoffrey Hunt has a handle on leadership today in The American Thinker:

Prescription drug plans, health care cost policies, social security, environmental protection and campaign finance reform do not define a nation. Ideology that inspires people everywhere to realize the ideal of liberty, that provides a model of democracy and vindicates moral principle, under God, defines our nation. It was true in 1630; it is still true today.

Only one candidate for President understands this.

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Here's a look at things to come on November 3, and explains why the Democrats, in a preemptive attack on the election, have been orchestrating so many fraudulent voter registrations in places like Colorado and Florida:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson warned Tuesday that if the November election ends in controversy, Democrats will fight back much more fiercely than they did after the 2000 election. Jackson's remarks before a meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre reflect a readiness by Democrats to start a legal ground war over perceived voter irregularities.

Here's another one.

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Kerry's hinky discharge from the Navy still is not a story that is attracting the mainstream media, and when I say that, I mean not in the way they are attracted to possible bad news about President Bush's past. You know, like a school of sharks. So the little old New York Sun is out there with plenty of ocean to swim in today:

An official Navy document on Senator Kerry's campaign Web site listed as Mr. Kerry's "Honorable Discharge from the Reserves" opens a door on a well kept secret about his military service. ...The review was likely held to improve Mr. Kerry's status of discharge from a less than honorable discharge to an honorable discharge.

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Meanwhile, David Horowitz discussed the Liberal hate campaign.

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It is amazing, when you watch the debates, what a sitting president cannot say. It must take a great deal of willpower.

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Finally! Something at which the French excel. This is what they are doing instead of making a lot of annoying phone calls at night.

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Michael Goodwin on the NY Times Magazine piece about John "Don't Lose Your Head Folks, Just Think Of It As A Nuisance" Kerry.

After interviewing Kerry's friends and aides, he comes away with a sketchy vision of a Kerry presidency that starts and ends with a dedication to diplomacy. The rest is the author's attempt to fashion a comprehensive Kerry Doctrine - even though he concedes Kerry has not offered one.

"One can infer ...," Bai writes in a typical passage in which he tries to make a cloth out of loose threads, "that if Kerry were able to speak less guardedly, in a less treacherous atmosphere than a political campaign, he might say, as some of his advisers do, that we are not in an actual war on terror."

Right - no war. Try selling that to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is scary stuff. And for those who read all the way to the end, the author suggests he recognizes the vacuum he has glimpsed.

"I came to understand ... the attacks really had not changed the way Kerry viewed or talked about terrorism," Bai writes.

His verdict is that Kerry's "vision might have seemed more satisfying - and would have been easier to talk about in a political campaign - in a world where the twin towers still stood."

I take that to mean Kerry might have been a good President before Sept. 11, 2001. Sounds right to me.