Life after Bush

We've got some great articles fresh off the presses for you, and yes, we're pretty proud of them. Don't miss Losing Minds, an article by Steven Weber and Michael Zielenziger about post-2008 election international policy, and Unfinished Business, a primer on major domestic issues. Both articles take on the tangles that whomever we elect as president in 2008 will have to face, and together with the John Yoo profile they make for some pretty interesting reading.

We eally want to hear from you, so read, think, and then come back here and click "comment."

--Meghan

Comments

[Lewis Palmer BS"43 MD '46]

John Woo has a much better grasp of the reality of the war and our enemy and his methods of operation than his critics. As an inde[endent thinker, Woo gets an A+.

[Michael Hughes]

How about an article on "life with
out Bush? Or Life under Gore? Life
under Kerry? Give me a BREAK. Bush
has made some mistakes.. but also
name a US president that hasn't.
I hate to see the California join
with 90% of the media and insult the 40% of Americans that feel
President Bush is doing what has
to be done!

[Maurice Nordstrom, '42]

We setup a prime-minister-government in Iraq to provide "decisiveness amid uncertainty." Yet Yoo does not address the question of amending the Constitution to setup a prime minister for us. Instead he wants to increase presidential power while the prime minister in Iraq directs the action. Yoo implies that when the president wants marriage only between male and female, in lieu of defining "man" and "woman," the president should prevail.

[Martha Hyde]

In the article "Losing Minds", why didn't the Pew Survey find out what percentage of Americans think that "violence against civilian targets can be justified in the defense of" Christianity? Many of these surveys do not really probe attitudes by ignoring the question in another venue.

[Anthony St. John '63]

I wish to congratulate CALIFORNIA Magazine for focusing on two of the most important survival issues for Americans, American Democracy and humanity in a row, the September/October “Global Warning” issue, and the new November/December 2006 “Life After Bush” issue.

You proposed two extremely important focus questions:

“Why are we losing on the battleground of ideas?”
ANSWER: American education has failed from the top down to protect and preserve American Democracy as required by the founders of the United States of America.

“What can we do about it?”
ANSWER: First, UC must purge the culture of entitlement that has resulted in the atrophy at the top of the two most important American institutions of education and democracy, causing the current failures to produce American ideas to protect, preserve and continue to improve our quality of life.

Specific examples in the last 50 years of UC history have all too frequently proven that institutional atrophy is a root cause of America’s failures to produce ideas:

First and foremost relative to your “Global Warning” issue are over 50 years of research failures by Teller’s LLNL and UC National Labs to create hydrogen energy solutions to eliminate the needs to continue to burn fossil fuels because their welfare culture is detached from the mundane needs of humanity.

Second is the destructive institutional culture of UC regents and executives, failing to provide leadership for quality education to perpetuate the golden age legacy provided by the extreme sacrifices of The Greatest Generation.

So UC and American education have failed to produce great leaders for the 21st century to maintain the legacy provided by our founders in the 18th century, and failed to produce any American science that equals the level of discovery by European quantum mechanics in the 20th century. Instead our institutions have produced destructive cultural values of inequality, exclusivity and arrogant marginalization of American citizens who dare to fight back. Thus the most unacceptable consequences we are experiencing today are the ongoing destruction of the American middle class, along with the decline and fall of the Wealth of America and American Democracy. Those are reasons why America is in extreme crisis, losing more and more global competitive advantages, along with out of control outsourcing of the Wealth of America, which UC regents and executives refuse to admit because of their culture of denial and refusal of responsibility.

UC leadership must face the crisis by accepting responsibility and accountability for the consequences of their most destructive cultural failures, because as the latest issue also notes, America’s failed education institution has produced an imperial presidency with threats against our Bill of Rights including Yoo’s diabolical warrantless searches and the power to torture, public health and protection systems breakdowns, deconstruction of the American middle class, out of control immigration of the poor while at the same time accelerating the outsourcing of the Wealth of America, and failures by American science to eliminate fossil fuel burning contributions to global warming with no solution in sight to avoid the tipping points we are now experiencing globally.