Jeffrey Toobin is an idiot, okay, and is rightly taking all kinds of .gif heat for this bullshit, but there’s something else at work here that overshadows the majority of the coverage of the Trump administration and the equally infuriating rehabbing of the Bush administration:
.@JeffreyToobin calls Trump “the great reputation killer.”
Kirstjen Nielsen “was a reasonably admired bureaucrat. For the rest of her life people will look at her and think, ‘Oh, that’s the woman who put children in cages.’” https://t.co/LSkSsWzjTF pic.twitter.com/rCKeMObkzZ
— Jeffrey Toobin (@JeffreyToobin) April 8, 2019
The sickness here is in Toobin’s ability to empathize and identify with Nielsen over the immigrant parents she ripped from their children. Nielsen is, after all, a pretty blond white lady, who appears at hearings and podiums dressed in a suit and nice shoes, who speaks in an even tone, so Toobin can see himself in her.
With very few wardrobe changes Jeffrey Toobin could be a nice capable bureaucrat who goes along to get along. Who spouts the party line for his boss and defends the indefensible and tries to make everyone believe that everything is fine. With very little effort — it doesn’t take a Trump to turn you, most people would do it for two quarters and a strawberry milkshake — he could be exactly where Nielsen is.
That should scare the shit out of him. The similarities between them should make him want to BRILLO HIS OWN SKIN OFF. And instead he’s casting her as some kind of innocent who’s been done wrong by an evil man and will now be unfairly punished. She deserves to be remembered for minimal competence at an office job!
If she’ll be remembered instead for her worst actions, what will Toobin be remembered for? If minimal competence at an office job and the ability to mouth complete sentences aren’t enough to buy you a spot in The Good Place, what on earth is? It’s a world gone mad.
A.
Nielsen’s role in the Katrina response failure should be enough to cement her reputation for doing evil – even for Tobin.