Where else could you even think about getting away with this? Call me crazy, but I have a hard time believing that someone working the drive-through at a fast-food chain for many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year less than Toobin makes for repeating the same liberal talking points about the Supreme Court could get away with touching his penis regardless of whether he insisted that he thought he had turned his headset off. If this were Geoffrey Tobin, Taco Bell staff, instead of Jeffrey Toobin, New Yorker staff writer, there wouldn’t even be a conversation.

This is not the impression you might get reading the response to this story so far, though. “Just when the world needs him most, Jeffrey Toobin exposes himself on Zoom,” a person called Vinay Menon writes in the Toronto Star, as if the guy had just come down with mono or something. “So let’s suppose Jeffrey Toobin had been caught on camera having sex with a partner instead of touching himself,” Jonathan Zimmerman proposes in the New York Daily News. Great point: Exposing your colleagues to two sets of private parts instead of just one would be way more courteous and professional. “Jeffrey Toobin Can’t Be the Only Person Masturbating on Zoom Calls,” a BuzzFeed writer muses. Please excuse me while I go drink bleach.

I don’t know how many levels of glue-sniffing partisan hackery you have to be on to arrive at positions like “Showing your penis to your colleagues during the presidential election version of Dungeons and Dragons is normal fine adult behavior,” but it must be a lot. What Toobin did was not normal. It was disgusting and would have gotten him fired already at any other job.