April 1, 2009

This Just In: Bush Justice Department Incompetent

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The withdrawal of charges against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens serves as more proof of what we already knew: the Bush DOJ couldn’t do anything right. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that “it is in the interest of justice to dismiss the indictment and not proceed with a new trial,” according to a statement he released this morning. Why drop the charges? Because the Bush Justice Department, which handled the prosecution, couldn’t, well, handle the prosecution. DOJ lawyers were accused (rightly, according to Holder) of withholding crucial information from the defense, and the trial subsequently degenerated into a series of embarrassments for an already-demoralized department. At one point, the DOJ lawyers were even held in contempt of court. Holder has asked the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility to look into the matter. Thankfully, the one thing the DOJ has been good at recently is releasing damning OPR reports (PDF, PDF, PDF) about how corrupt, incompetent, and politicized it became during the Bush years.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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