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Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Jeffrey Toobin's Lucrative Self-Promotional Train Wreck

TNR provides a rather distasteful but indispensable minute by minute account of the way Jeffrey Toobin marketed his new book by catapulting carefully crafted "trainwreck" and then "plane wreck" tweets into layer after layer of the Village vapidsphere, in ways that didn't reflect so much judicious assessments or efforts at clarifying events on which he was commenting from a position of useful expertise, but always instead with an eye to the best possible timing to get his own personal snowball rolling into an avalanche of ever higher profile self-promotion. The way Toobin shaped the panic stricken conventional wisdom on the significance of the debased state of Supreme Court questioning of provisions of the Affordable Care Act actually had real world ramifications, real in a sense that contains more than the higher number of books he will sell with the augmented halo of name-recognition he has managed to craft at the expense of sensible deliberation on urgently important issues to which he would presumably claim to have devoted his life, some of which eventually even found their way to the mouth of the President of the United States.

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