Clyde Haberman has to be the grouchiest, most curmudgeonly columnist at the New York Times, and I love him for it. He is a master at cutting through bullshit, and his column today, about George Tenet and Tenet’s new book, is full of the jaded insight that defines his work. You can tell he’s really an idealist at heart, but he’ll be damned if he comes out and says so.

Here, for example, is a brilliant paragraph:

For “Today,” Mr. Tenet went yesterday to the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center. The usual early-morning crowd had already gathered, a congregation of screamers praying for the cameras to catch them in full cry and with homemade signs held aloft: “It’s my birthday” and “Hey, Mrs. Steinberg.”

The comic payoff of those two sentences really comes with those last three words, “Hey, Mrs. Steinberg,” which are wonderfully nonsensical. They tell you all you need to know about Haberman’s opinion of the “congregation of screamers” outside the Today show, which is truly one of the oddest rituals of American life. (There is no clearer manifestation of the difference between New York and the rest of the country in the way that New Yorkers think of this tourist ritual, and the tourists who get up at 5 A.M. to stand outside a TV studio in the desperate hope that Al Roker will acknowledge their existence, like a priest offering a communion wafer.)

Here’s another great paragraph:

Another ritual of publishing requires that a controversial book be characterized as “tell-all” even if, as in this case, a more accurate description might be “tell-some.” As a fillip, there is, with Mr. Tenet, an unavoidable question of “tell when.”

After which Haberman warms to his point; here comes the idealism!

He is the latest in a long line of government officials who built careers on the taxpayers’ nickel and then turned their résumés into multimillion-dollar book deals. All but lost is the fact that any information they possess belongs to the public; they were nothing more than temporary custodians.

This is old-school stuff: The director of the CIA serves the American people. So why did he not tell us before the war that there was no serious debate in the White House about Iraq?

Haberman points out that Condoleeza Rice has intimated that she’ll be writing her own book.

Great. We can then go through the rituals all over again. They might include another sacrament of publishing that we almost forgot: the book party. For Mr. Tenet, or Ms. Rice, the menu need not be elaborate. A simple pastry would do. Like yellow cake.

Simply fantastic.