The Diddly Award

Honoring our rubber-stamp Congress, whose members have found plenty of time to do squat.

Illustration By: Peter Hoey

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


The See-No-Evil Black Hood is awarded to the U.S. senator most adept at confecting an excuse for the torture
at Abu Ghraib, which not only shamed the nation but failed to yield a single known piece of valuable
intel. The nominees are…

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who announced that he—and
many others—were “more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.”
Despite a report from the Red Cross estimating that as many as 90 percent of Iraqi inmates were
“arrested
by mistake,” Inhofe elaborated: “These prisoners, you know they’re not there
for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re
murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American
blood on their hands, and here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”
(Later, U.S. forces released more than 2,000 of these detainees.)

Sen. Zell Miller (ambiguous political orientation-Ga.) said that the sexual degradation
at Abu Ghraib was just high school gym stuff: “The two times I think I have been most
humiliated in my life was standing in a big room, naked as a jaybird with about 50 others, and they
were checking us out. Now that was humiliating…. It didn’t kill us, did it? No one
ever died from humiliation.”

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), at a hearing with General John P. Abizaid, the commander of
U.S. forces in the Middle East, after the scandal broke, said he was bewildered by the “unreal”
press accounts and promised Abizaid that he’d go easy on him because, “It’s been
a landslide of criticism.”

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), apparently looking back to the days of Bull Connor sic-cing
hounds on civil rights marchers, harrumphed about the guards’ use of unmuzzled dogs, “Hey,
nothing wrong with holding a dog up there, unless the dog ate him.”

And the Hood goes to… Pat Roberts, who, within earshot of a New York Times reporter, began his investigation
of the scandal by whispering to Gen. Abizaid: “I’ll throw you a couple of softballs.”

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.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

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.

payment methods

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.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

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.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate