Who’s Toobin Who
21st October 2020
Scott Johnson at PowerLine creates a useful new word.
Lee Smith places the disgrace of Jeffrey Toobin into the context of the New Yorker’s political project in the Spectator USA column “Jeffrey Toobin’s stroke of misfortune” (“He is not the first journalist to get overexcited about ‘coup porn’”). Lee painted the big media picture out of which it emerged in the Tablet column “Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes—or Joe Biden’s Big Mouth.”
Lee’s Spectator column made me think back to the New Yorker’s role in promoting the Steele Dossier back in 2018. I devoted five posts to what I called “Jane Mayer’s Dossiad” (all of them and more related items accessible at the link). Mayer is the star New Yorker staff writer who gave Christopher Steele the Tiger Beat treatment.
As Lee suggests, Jeffrey Toobin represents a larger phenomenon. I would describe the phenomenon as repetitive conduct performed disgracefully in public with a compulsive element. Let us give make it a verb and call it Toobin in his honor. Used in a sentence, for example, we may ask: Is the New Yorker Toobin again?