I finished reading Jeffrey Toobin’s profile of Nixonian dirty trickster Roger Stone yesterday, and came away thinking it was the New Yorker‘s best read since last year’s piece on Karl Lagerfeld. It was unapologetically full of filth (Toobin opens the essay in a Miami swingers’ club, sipping vodka from a plastic cup, porn playing on the plasmas at the bar), and structurally innovative, framing Stone’s ruthless exploits by layering them on top of his Confucian dicta for proper ball-busting: “[Hounding Eliot Spitzer] was, in short, Stone’s idea of entertainment. ‘I thought Spitzer was punk, and I wanted to fuck with him any way I could,’ he said. (Rule: ‘Hate is a stronger motivator than love.’)” It’s brilliant stuff.

Interesting, then, to open my email this morning and find this MediaBistro item that has the National Review contending that Toobin, uh, drew some heavy inspiration from a November, 2007 profile of Stone that ran in the Weekly Standard: “The similarities are striking, the most egregious of which is a device [author Matt] Labash uses throughout his piece. He repeatedly breaks up anecdotes with ‘Stone’s Rules’ — things like ‘Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack,’ as well as ‘White shirt + tan face = confidence.’”

There’s also this shot to the ribs: “If it hasn’t appeared in the New Yorker, it hasn’t appeared.”

That last bit was savage enough to get Toobin to email a public apology: “The gist of the complaint against me is not plagiarism (because there was none), but discourtesy — that is, it would have been appropriate for me to offer a hat-tip or shout-out to Matt’s work. … I should have acknowledged Matt’s articles, which I did read and enjoyed a great deal. So let me take this opportunity to apologize to Matt and The Weekly Standard.”

Curiously enough, there’s been nothing but silence from Romenesko thus far.

[terrifying image via]