Exit Strategy: How to Fix a Post-Bush Nation

It’s time to start putting the US back together. Herewith, our wide-ranging guide to the country’s most urgent, yet fixable, problems.

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Exit Strategy

The Bush legacy—where to begin? How about eight years ago,
when we started chronicling the foibles and fiascoes of what many of
our colleagues and even some conservative commentators would eventually
recognize as the Worst. Administration. Ever. For us muckrakers, the
Bush era has been a paradoxical paradise: The more dire things got, the
more material we had. We’ve devoted hundreds of pages to the Iraq War,
the war on terror, and the war on the environment. So aside from a
hearty “Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out,” what’s left
to say?

Actually, a lot. There are the scandals we’ve only begun to piece together—from the gutting of basic consumer protections (The Chinavore’s Dilemma) to the destruction of the very records we’ll need to assess the wreckage (What Was gwb@whitehouse.gov Really Up To?).
Bush and Cheney may ride off into the sunset, but we’ll be sifting
through their debris for years. Iraq will haunt us for a generation or
more, and the implosion of the economy could reverberate just as long.
And even a President Obama might think twice about relinquishing the
kingly powers amassed by this White House. But there are fairly quick
and painless ways to reverse at least some of the damage—like giving
the boot to the ideologues, restoring due process, and bringing science
(and common sense) back to public policy. In this package, we’ve
highlighted some of the most urgent, and most fixable, problems the
next president can tackle. The true measure of the Bush legacy may be
how much of it we’re capable of undoing.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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