Dizzy

The world of political spin is one in which no one can dare take another’s words at face value. War can be peace, freedom can be slavery, and ignorance can be strength, if a source close to the White House deems it so.

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Some people say spin is lying. (“Spin is lying,” says essayist Roger Rosenblatt.) Some people say it is not. (“Spin is not lying,” says P.R. maven Howard Rubenstein.) Others take a middle position. (“It’s a matter of degree,” says former Reagan adviser Lyn Nofziger.) In fact, with spin, one can never be sure. That’s the point. “Lies or not,” notes Clinton campaign adviser Ann Lewis, “spin adds up to more than just the truth.”

In Bill Clinton’s Washington, most people seem to find the question of spin vs. lying largely irrelevant. The city operates under what Washington Post White House correspondent Ann Devroy calls a “tacit understanding, that even though we say you shouldn’t lie, the definition of lies and the definition of truth are all sort of malleable.”

This malleability is one reason our politics have ceased to have much relationship to governance. That obsolete ideal has been replaced by a theater of the absurd designed simply to foster the impression of governance. This is true not only at the skanky margins, where a self-evident crook like Al D’Amato can appoint himself an ethics cop, but right in the red-hot center of the political system.

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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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