This Week in National Insecurity: Labor Day Edition

DOD photo / <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_soldiers_stuck_in_sand_in_southern_Afghanistan.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>

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Welcome, insecure reader: Today is our special Labor Day edition! As you plan your leisure activities for the long weekend, MoJo offers you a host of national-security-related entertainment options: watching Iraq’s hottest suicide-bombing-comedy TV show; playing Muslim dress-up in New York with Israeli spies; viewing the movie and playing the video game that the military doesn’t want you to see; speaking truth to power, only seven years too late; checking out the latest in militarized femme Christian emo rock; and harshly judging the dancing boys of Afghanistan.

The sitrep:

The United States government’s national threat level is Elevated, or Yellow. You’re welcome.

  • What do you get when you cross MTV’s Punk’d with Hurt Locker? You get the latest sign Iraq is becoming normal—like, America normal—a thriving celeb-reality TV industry! To wit: the new show, Put Him in Camp Bucca, on Iraq’s Al-Baghdadiya TV station, which frames up celebs for carrying car bombs, then secretly tapes the hilarity as they try to talk themselves out of incarceration at the new Abu Ghraib. Says a recent celebrity guest: “I am a family man. I have two kids. How could I do this to my family? I am telling you the truth, it’s not me who planted the bomb.” Ha ha ha ha, crazy. It’s cool, though, we’re doing the same thing. Just, like, not funny or anything.
  • Israeli Mossad spies of Arab descent, who are in the US posing as UN diplomats, also pose as American intelligence officers of Arab descent in order to convince Muslim Americans, mostly of Arab descent, to cooperate with them in rooting out domestic Hamas sympathizers, since (obviously!) the Muslim Americans will be much more helpful to US spooks than Israeli ones. Shockingly, this “inverted false flag” operation isn’t going so well. Simplify, Maccabean operatives. Simplify.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

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