We drove into the deep desert today to a town called Hatta. It was a great drive--I'd never seen real-life sand dunes before. It was incredibly desolate, and very, very cool. Actually, it was very, very hot, but you know what I mean.

Before heading home, we stopped for lunch at a highly Westernized fancy-pants hotel. Big buffet. While I was finishing my dessert, which consisted of flan (Mexico), baklava (Greece/Mediterranean), chocolate cake (Europe/US), and profiteroles (France), the Filipino band playing lunch struck up a nice version of "Broken Wings." And two things occurred to me:

1. Dessert can bring the world together, and
2. If the goal of every person is to leave the world a better place than they found it, then Mister Mister has a lot to be proud of.

 
Shall we talk about today's news items? Yes, we shall.

---The New York Times reports today that Wesley Clark has decided to enter the Presidential race, and is simply waiting for fortuitous timing to make his announcement. Not much yet on how effective he'll be at overcoming the obstacles associated with running late in the race, but surely the DLC is salivating about this--Southerner, the biggest military badass in the country, literally, brilliantly smart guy. Who's screwed? John Kerry. Can't tout that "I'm the military stud in this group" line any more. I like Kerry, so that's too bad. But if it's Clark, fantastic. Anyone who can defeat the Worst President Ever.

---The Bush Administration has decided to alter a key part of the Clean Air Act. This regulation is known as New Source Review, and at first glance it's a bit arcane. I have some moderate expertise in the issue, because it was a center of some of my work in a former life as an environmental lobbyist. In brief: many of the stricter air pollution regulations of the Clean Air Act exempted really old power plants under the assumption that those plants would be closing soon enough. However, those plants have remained open so that utilities can avoid bringing them up to snuff--some of the plants originally came on line in the twenties and thirties, if you can believe that, and are incredibly filthy.

In response, the NSR regulation was set up to mandate that utilities, whenever doing more than routine maintenance on a power plant, have to install pollution technologies to bring it into compliance with modern standards. In other words, utilities can use those crappy old plants until they want to make them more efficient or whatever, upgrade them substantially, and then they also have to make them clean.

This regulation drives utilities crazy, because it hits them in the pocketbook. But it also works as leverage to clean up those old plants. Now that we have the Worst President Ever, the utilities have finally taken their opportunity to shred the policy. It's a blatant handout to the energy industry.

There will be lawsuits from the states, who are almost unanimously opposed to the change. The Bush Administration's response was surprising; Vice-President Dick Cheney was overheard saying "Eat it raw, you clean air-loving bastards!"

---In the Most Outrageous Decision Of The Day category, the winner by a landslide is the Adminstration's decision to cut US funding to a group that does AIDS work for African and Asian refugees. Why? Evidently there are fears that this group is somehow involved in forced abortions. But read this section from the NYT article:

"State Department officials acknowledge that they have no evidence to suggest that Marie Stopes is involved in forced abortions or involuntary sterilization, and the group itself says it has been trying to end forced abortions in China and to expand voluntary family planning."

No evidence? Are you kidding me? So let's see....unsubstantiated rumors are forcing us to cut money from a group who's stated goal is to expand family planning and thus end the need for abortions at all. Gosh, I wonder which radical religious agenda is involved here?

Hey you! Religious right! Yeah, you with the Bible. Listen, do me a favor: go home and die.

 
doo da doo da doo doo...that's Elmo's World!

We had a terrific time at a dinner party a couple nights ago, meeting some people we’re really looking forward to spending time with in Dubai. An interesting part of our conversation centered around homeschooling and television for children. A really cool couple at the party has two girls not far in age from our two. They are thinking seriously of homeschooling their kids. And their kids never see television.

I know other parents who are diligent about avoiding TV for their kids, in a few cases going far enough that they don’t own a TV at all. I hadn’t really thought about it that much, but I’ve spent some time mulling over this question: How much television should young kids see?

To each their own. If given a choice between extremes--no television at all versus around the clock showings of “The King of Queens” and “JAG”--I certainly would pick the former. But I confess that a part of me can’t understand the decision to try and keep TV out of children’s lives.

We live in Dubai, so it’s not like we’re watching TV all the time. The local sitcom isn’t going to do it for us. We have cable options that will allow us to see some American programming, but we haven’t really gotten it together on that front. So TV options here include Sesame Street on tape, Teletubbies on tape, and a few Baby Einstein DVDs. These are shown with some regularity.

Is this a mistake? To suggest so is premised on the notion that nothing good can come out of the entire medium, which seems awfully silly to me. Educational television is, from my perspective, a proven phenomenon. According to my mother, I learned a lot of things from watching Sesame Street back in the day. I don’t believe that kids just sit there staring, without soaking things in. Seeing words on the screen, numbers on the screen, people talking or acting in a certain way--these are useful, and no less so because they’re on TV. While much of TV is crap, the problem is with programming and not with the medium itself. You don’t hear anyone saying “I don’t allow my kids to listen to music because I object to gangster rap.” But the logic is the same--some TV is terrible, so forget the whole thing.

There’s also, I have to say, a bit of snootiness involved in the decision to forego television for children. I’m reminded of one of the all-time classic Onion articles--”Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own a Television.” It's funny because it's true--great line in the article: "I'm not an elitist," Green said. "It's just that I'd much rather sculpt or write in my journal or read Proust than sit there passively staring at some phosphorescent screen."

There’s a certain amount of attitude involved in the rejection of TV--an insinuation that the better people do what they did in the old days. Read a novel! Use oilpaints! Build a soapbox racer! Do some needlepoint! Shoot a b'ar! Whittle!

Here’s a fact, like it or not: television is a big part of our culture. A huge part. Not having it in the house is not going to make it disappear, and unless you only allow your children to socialize with other kids who are sans TV, they’re going to see it. And they’re probably going to watch things you don’t like at all. The forbidden fruit syndrome is for real; I’ve experienced it firsthand. Not so much with TV, but because my parents never allowed me to eat sugared cereals, now I can’t stop myself from stuffing my gob with Cookie Crisp and BooBerry every chance I get. If I hadn’t been allowed to watch the Dukes of Hazzard every week, one can only speculate what I’d be doing now. Certainly not writing--probably watching “Joanie Loves Chachi” reruns with a line of drool heading down my shirt while finishing my third box of "Oops! All Berries!" Cap'n Crunch.

I watched TV as a kid. Not that much, but some. I’m not screwed up. I have friends who watched A TON of TV as children. They aren’t screwed up. Why? Like everything else in parenting, it’s how you handle it that counts. If you’re a good parent beyond the television, then the only real harm in watching "Caillou" sometimes is that, as a parent, you’d like to see someone drop a piano on that little fucker.

Throwing the television out doesn’t make you a bad parent, for sure. But it doesn’t automatically make you a good one.

 
Hilarious moments in accents:

I took Mercedes to a Gymboree Music class today. It was "Surf Music Theme" day, with a lot of beach stuff and Beach Boys. The woman in charge of the class was Asian. Her English was great, grammatically. However, she did have an accent which resulted in what sounded like a lot of talk about "Surfin' at the Bitch" and listening to the Bitchboys.

 
Clark v. Bush--Clash of the Titans?

Who has seen this? It’s the latest Zogby poll, and it found both that Bush’s approval ratings have slipped to 52%, and, more significantly, that in a race against any Democratic challenger, Bush loses 48-45%. This, to me, is incredibly significant--of course, it’s not covered in the major media outlets because then they would have to change their “Bush is an unbeatable machine” line.

I've said it before. I'll say it again. Bush is in trouble. Consider:

--he didn't win the popular vote last time. It was only a bizarre set of circumstances that resulted in his win, meaning he has to up his numbers, not cause a decline in them

--the "I'm angry" vote is no longer for Bush, as it was in 2000. It's against him.

--Beyond question, there are moderates who voted for Bush because he played the moderate. But no one believes he's a moderate now.

--The Nader factor--and I'll avoid the larger questions about this--will be reduced. Many who voted for Nader will now vote against Bush.

And none of those are really about the policy questions, simply the demographic realities. He's in trouble.

The most interesting development over the next few days is the question of what’s going to happen with Wesley Clark. Clark will allegedly decide by the end of the week whether or not he’s going to run, and insiders seem confident that he will.

I’ll say it now: I’m a big, big Clark fan. I like the things he’s said about domestic policy, I think he’s right on in his commentary about foreign policy, and the guy is quite literally the biggest badass I’ve ever read or heard anything about. I signed the petition at http://draftclark2004.com, and there’s a chance that I would send money to his campaign, something I’ve never done before.

Hyperbole reader and resident badass himself, Paul S. Hayes, put together the following terrific line-by-line comparison of the resumes of Bush and Clark. I couldn’t improve on it, so I asked his permission to just use it as follows:

Bush - average student at elite private high school, is admitted to Yale due to family connections. According to a Newsweek profile, he "went to Yale but seems to have majored in drinking at the Deke House." Despite academic mediocrity, family connections later get him into Harvard Business School.

Clark - graduates 1st in his class from a public high school and is admitted to West Point. Clark, graduates 1st in his class from West Point, spends a year working at the National Poverty Center, earns a Master's Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, where he is a Rhodes Scholar.

Bush - uses his family connections to get into National Guard and avoid fighting in Vietnam, fails to attend drills for an entire year, is suspended from flight duty for failure to take a physical that includes a drug test, and is allowed to leave the Guard nearly a year early at his request.

Clark - commands a mechanized infantry company that sees combat in Vietnam, is shot four times, is awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star, and then spends a year learning to walk without a limp and to shake hands, despite missing significant portions of his left calf and musculature in his right hand. Over the course of his military career Clark receives two Bronze Stars, honorary Knighthoods from the British and Dutch governments, three Defense Distinguished Service Medals, a Distinguished Service Medal, four Legion of Merit awards, two Meritorious Service Medals, and two Army Commendation Medals.

Bush - spends most of the decade developing a long-lasting reputation as a drinker, womanizer, and a recreational (if not habitual) user of illegal drugs. In 1976, he's arrested and pleads guilty to drunk driving, a fact that he uses his family connections to keep secret for over 20 years. In 1977, he starts his first oil company using family money and uses the company to tout himself as a Texas businessman during an unsuccessful run for Congress, despite the fact that records on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission prove that the business did not start active operations until March 1979, months after Bush lost the race.

Clark - continues his training as a U.S. military officer, graduates from the National War College, Command and General Staff College, Armor Officer Advanced and Basic Courses, and Ranger and Airborne schools. In 1975-76, Clark serves as a White House Fellow, and later as a Special Assistant to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He serves as an instructor and later Assistant Professor of Social Science at the United States Military Academy. When the U. S. Army tests a thousand of its officers to see how well they extrapolate future trends from current patterns, Clark finishes first.

Bush - After his failed political bid, Bush goes into the oil business, uses family money and connections to start an oil business that fails, renames business and it fails again. The business is purchased by another oil company, in large part because they want to purchase Bush's family connections. When this third oil company also fails, it is purchased by Harken Energy, again for the purpose of cashing in on Bush's family connections (his father is then President).

Clark - continues to climb the military chain of command. During the Cold War, he commands two infantry divisions stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. He then spends 5 years training leaders and soldiers at the National Training Center and with the Battle Command Training Program. Clark helps train many of the forces that subsequently saw combat operations in Desert Storm. Despite the complaints of other officers that his training methods are too harsh - in Clark's drills, U.S. troops were almost always faced with seemingly insurmountable odds -- Clark is generally given significant credit for reshaping a demoralized army that was still operating under the cloud of Vietnam into the volunteer force that won Desert Storm.

Bush - In 1990, Bush sells the bulk of his Harken stock for $848,000. A week later, the stock plummets in value on news of a large quarterly loss. Bush claims that he had submitted a required report about the stock sale but it had somehow disappeared. An investment team selects Bush to lead their bid to buy the Texas Rangers, the owner of which is a friend of Bush's father. After Bush's family connections make the sale possible, Bush uses his family's pull in Texas to lobby for a state funded arena. After the arena is built, Bush sells his share of the team (and the new arena), effectively transferring a portion of the millions of tax payer dollars used to build the arena directly into his pocket.

Clark - From 1994 to 1996, Clark was the Director of the Pentagon's Strategic Plans and Policy operation, where Clark is responsible for world-wide politico-military affairs and U.S. military strategic planning. In 1995, Clark led the military negotiations for the Bosnian Peace Accords at Dayton. From 1996-97, Clark was Commander-in-Chief, United States Southern Command, Panama, where he commanded all U.S. forces and was responsible for the direction of most U.S. military activities and interests in Latin America and the Caribbean. From July 1997, until his retirement in June of 2000, General Clark was the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, serving then also as the Commander-in-Chief for the United States European Command. Clark oversaw the U.S.-led military intervention in Kosovo, a multilateral intervention that included 40 allied nations, is the largest European military operation since World War II, and is widely praised for removing Slobodan Milosovic, preventing a fourth round of ethinic cleansing, and stabilizing the region without the loss of a single American or Allied life. In 1999, Clark retires from the military and becomes the Chairman of the Board of WaveCrest, a company that builds clean and efficient electronic propulsion systems. In 2000, Clark receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award that can be granted to a civilian.

Bush - Dresses up like a fighter pilot, flies outdated, out of service airplane for a portion of a trip to an aircraft carrier, but lets an actual pilot handle the take-off and landing. Gets action figure.

Clark - As a three star general in 1995, at the age of 50, rides in a Humvee to negotiations in Sarajevo. When one of the vehicles in his convoy breaks through the shoulder of a mountain road and falls several hundred meters, Clark ties a rope to a tree stump and rappels down the mountainside to see if there are any survivors -- despite gunfire, warnings that the mountainside was heavily mined, rain and mud. No action figure as of yet.

 
Let's Drink Our Contraband and Watch Blade II!

We’ve recently gotten a membership to a video rental store here in Dubai. It’s one of the testimonials to the level of Westernization here that there are multiple video rental places to choose from, stocked with tons of Hollywood’s best. It’s terrific to have--we like to rent movies, and it feels less like we’re far from home when we can watch Armageddon whenever we want.

However, the government of the UAE practices active censorship. They have sweeping powers of the sort that John Ashcroft can only dream about. Of course, only sex or anything close to it is censored, excluding things that are politically or religiously offensive. Those are rare enough that it’s all about sex, effectively.

DVD’s cannot be censored, evidently, so if you rent a DVD you know it is intact. Movies, even new movies, that have to be censored come out here only on VHS, and will either have big cuts out of the plotline or will have black boxes over the offending parts. We had been even been warned that any videotapes we brought into the country would, upon arrival, be confiscated for editing. As such, we dutifully mailed Mercedes’ Sesame Street tapes to ourselves, so as to avoid the censor’s knife in confronting the heretofore undefined relationship between Ernie and Bert.

For the most part, the movies available tilt heavily to action-adventure, with some dingbat PG-rated romantic comedies available. There are exceptions, but there’s no question but that violent shoot-em-ups are the genre du jour among Emiratis, and what Emiratis set the pace here.

We’ve also recently gotten our liquor license--that is, our license to purchase and not to sell. You can’t just swagger into a liquor store--you have to have government permission. This being a Muslim country, liquor isn’t everywhere, but this being a cosmopolitan city, there are liquor stores here in a variety of places. But you wouldn’t know it. In fact, we only learned after being here for three weeks that the local shopping center, where I go all the time in order to hit the grocery store and Fun Corner, has two liquor stores!

How could I not have known this? It’s quite easy, really--first of all, the liquor stores are on the ends of the shopping center, and unlike the rest of the stores, their doors are on the outside. Second of all, the doors are entirely nondescript--one gets the distinct impression of going to a speakeasy when entering. Finally, the liquor stores are deceptively named--while looking for “Khalid’s Beer Emporium” or “Non-Muslims Liquorama” one can be forgiven for missing “Maritime and Mercantile International” and “African and Eastern Ltd.” Both of these hold nothing but liquor within. And not a bad selection.

It’s the peculiar nature of Muslim business compromise, I suppose, that liquor can be sold, but it can’t be easy to get. Somehow, I suspect that those shades of gray won’t be found in the Koran, but who am I to judge?

 
Bush In Deep


Let’s dive in to the first real installment of the new Hyperbole with some political talk, shall we?

There is a terrific article in the Washington Post today outlining the reasons why national security may be a liability for Bush in 2004, despite conventional wisdom. It argues that the crumbling “peace” in the Middle East, tied in with what increasingly looks like a disaster driven by utter incompetence in Iraq, could result in voters seeing Bush as a foreign policy failure. One choice paragraph:

"Independent experts see more political trouble than advantage for Bush in Iraq. 'There is a substantial potential for the occupation of Iraq to become a deep political problem for Bush,' according to Ohio State University's John Mueller, an authority on public opinion and war. If things go well, people will lose interest, but if things go badly, 'people are increasingly likely to see the war as a mistake, and starting and continuing wars that people come to consider mistaken does not enhance a president's reelectability.'"

It’s a good point, in that it takes into account the public’s inability to pay attention to a damned thing unless it is a disaster.

I think Bush is in real trouble. If the economy suddenly bursts forward, then he could look better. But continued sluggishness is going to really hurt.

I have no optimism at all as it relates to Iraq (real optimism about the situation there, not optimism about the politics, since it is the sad reality that a bad outcome in Iraq increases the likelihood of a good outcome in November, 2004). The situation is improved in one major way--Saddam Hussein is gone. Can’t downplay that. But the troops are still there, and some of them are dying and they’re making noise about wanting to come home at the same time as political pressures are increasing to send more troops. Uh-oh.

I’ll neglect the opportunity to talk about Vietnam parallels right now.

Beyond that, as the bombing this week demonstrates, the situation is increasingly unsafe for non-Americans as well as Americans in Iraq. The most eye-opening part of the Post article is that 63% of the public considers the war and its aftermath a success, though that is down from 85%. What in the world? Again, it is unforgivable to forget or downplay the fact that Saddam is gone. That’s huge. But there are a lot of problems in Iraq that are nowhere near concluding, and the possibility that Iraq will become a rallying point and even operating center for Al Qaeda remains open. It’s not a total failure, due to Saddam’s removal. But in every other regard it sure looks like one.

Which brings me back to the central point--foreign policy could be Waterloo for GW. Things are not good in the world, and while many of things are not Bush’s fault, you’d better believe that some of them are. If the public decides to care, look out.

There are a lot of electoral issues at play as well as it relates to the election, but that’s a larger question that I’ll write about when I go to work on Wesley Clark in the next couple of days.

 
Well, this is the new version of Hyperbole. The old version was at Salon blogs, here. It has a long history. OK, not that long. But long enough that it's a bit annoying to jog that history in the middle to switch to Blogger. I like Blogger so far, of course, but moving is always a pain in the ass, isn't it?

Lots to do and say, but I'll save some time now. I'm just trying to work out the site. I'm going to be making a lot of changes to the template, including adding some graphics and whatnot, so if you come regularly, expect things to look different around here. And hopefully more exciting. Certainly couldn't look much more boring than it currently does.

 
Now I am beginning to roll along here. I think that tomorrow I may actually put up something of substance and begin my painful transition away from Salon blogs.