Who’s Toobin who

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?

Former members of the “intelligence community” are Toobin again big time. Politico reports: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” I infer that John Brennan was the ringleader of this particular circus. A former Brennan aide provided the letter to Politico on Monday.

They really ought to stop it. Many of them having promoted the Russia hoax from the inside — Brennan himself was a protagonist in the scandal — they now seek to disparage and suppress the news emerging from Hunter Biden’s hard drive as Russian disinformation.

They concede in the letter: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

Like Toobin (the cretin), they have a problem. They won’t give it up and they make “intelligence” sound like an oxymoron. They will be Toobin again in response to the news reported by the Post “DOJ reportedly agrees Hunter Biden emails are not Russian disinformation” and by FOX News “The FBI and Justice Department concur with DNI Ratcliffe that the laptop is not part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

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