Benny Johnson is the viral politics editor-digital director guy fired from BuzzFeed now at the National Review who has a knack for making meme material. He’s also a plagiarist who gets things wrong, on accident and on purpose, because it’s the internet, so who cares (I guess)?
Colorado politics readers know Johnson as the BuzzFeed list-maker who identified Colorado Independent columnist Mike Littwin as a “vagrant lurker” in a blurb meant to mock politicians who might stumble into photographs where people who look like Mike somehow make it into the frame and are not later cropped out! (There are no vagrant lurkers or iconically hirsute columnists in the real America, that shining city on a hill!) Informed that his vagrant lurker was an award-winning journalist and a staple of the Colorado press corps, Johnson apologized and updated his post.
This week, Johnson is back in the news for starting a Bill-Clinton-is-still-a-lech meme. As Gawker points out, Johnson made opportunistic use of a recent Bill’s-night-out photo from a Clinton Foundation dinner to bait the right-wing mediasphere — and it worked. Johnson cropped the photo so the former president, Andrea Catsimatidis and her ostentatious cleavage remain and Andrea’s mom does not. The absence of the mom makes a difference. Blog-and-talk-radio world lit up, and typically got what is not-okay about the photo all wrong. The problem has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with ugly capitalism and money in politics.
Gawker’s Andy Cush:
“The irony is that the photo is gross and incriminating, but it has nothing to do with Andrea Catsimatidis’ boobs. John Catsimatidis is a billionaire who failed to pay grocery store workersmillions of dollars worth of overtime wages, employed a mayoral campaign consultant who was arrested on bribery and corruption charges, and is really only valuable to Bill Clinton for having tons and tons of money and a private jet. In his advanced age, Clinton’s libido may be diminished, but his propensity for cozying up with the world’s worst rich people is alive and well.”
Benny Johnson: As viral as he is wrong, again.
[Top photo: Mike Littwin, left, Clinton and Catsimatidis.]
