September 3, 2010

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.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

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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.

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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.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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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.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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