National Review Burnishes 'Serious Journalism' Rep By Hiring Disgraced Plagiarist Benny Johnson

If you were concerned that hack plagiarist Benny Johnson, Buzzfeed's former viral politics editor and laughing stock of the internet -- which he loves : ) -- would disappear into oblivion and fade from our memories, pinch your collective selves and quit your daydreaming because it turns out that there is still one cockroach-infested corner of the internet that thinks Benny would make a fine addition to its staff, and it is National Review!

We learned this from Rich "Starbursts" Lowry, who EXCLUSIVELY! gossiped it to Politico's Mike Allen, thus requiring geniuses everywhere to invent an entirely new kind of math to calculate all the derp contained in this single paragraph :

EXCLUSIVE: Benny Johnson, the BuzzFeed “viral politics editor” who was fired for plagiarism in July, will start Monday as National Review’s social media director, a new position. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, tells us: “Benny made a terrible mistake. But he has owned up to it and learned from it. He's a talented journalist, with obviously a lot to contribute. He knows he's joining a storied institution at NR, and we look forward to his helping us carry on our mission across all platforms.”

It seems like only yesterday the world discovered that "Buzzfeed Benny" was not merely terrible at journalism, but also terrible at plagiarizing. (For reals, if you're going to steal words what other people wrote, maybe aim for a slightly higher caliber than Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers.)

Ben Smith, Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, at first insisted that he wouldnotfire Benny, "one of the web’s deeply original writers," because who among us has not accidentally copy-and-pasted other people words and tried to pass them off as our own on once or twice? (Yeah yeah, everyone waving their hands and saying "Me! I never did that!" Put your hands down. We see you.) But after reviewing hundreds of examples of Benny's "deeply original" work -- and yes, we still have all the sympathy in the world for the editors tasked with that excruciating job -- Buzzfeed discovered that Benny had been less than deeply original on at least 41 occasions and thus Smith had no choice but to YOU'RE FIRED! him, leaving us all to breathe a sigh of relief that perhaps our long national nightmare of 56 Reasons Why You Would Rather Eat A Box Of Rusty Nails Than Look At These Princess Bride GIFs Explaining Various Atrocities Because LOL! was finally over.

Alas, National Review does not have the same "editorial standards" and is happy to welcome Benny to its sordid pages, where, we expect, he can deploy his copy-and-paste talents to carry out National Review's mission of spreading Kathryn's Lopez's prurient pope fantasies, without the limitations of Buzzfeed's prohibition on "haters."

We are hard-pressed to imagine a better place for Benny to land (except maybe his old home at Glenn Beck's The Blaze, where he first learned how to "journalism") than National Review, which has given the world so many amazing reasons to never stop drinking that we damn near broke the interweb searching our archives to bring you an obligatory listicle of our favorites:

1. National Review Man Maybe Tries To Make A Funny About Soccer, Hurts Self In Process 

2. National Review Explains Why More Black Preschoolers Are Suspended: It’s Because They Are Criminals 

3. National Review So Mad Someone Let Sonia Sotomayor Race Bait All Over A Supreme Court Opinion 

4. National Review: Hispanics Triumph In American Dream Of Lifetime Working At Walmart 

5. If The Kids Love Obama So Much, Let Them Sign Up For Obamacare 

6. National Review: Only A Monster Would Say The Nazis Didn’t Make Sense 

7. Not At All Racist or Sexist National Review Staff Tells You Why Not to Vote For The President 

8. NRO Weeps For America’s New Oppressed Minority: Poll Truthers 

9. K-Lo Posts Her Dream Recipe: Carcass Stuffed With 10 Hamburgers 

And this bonus from Yr Deeply Original Wonkette:  What If The National Review Had Co-Written All Of Maya Angelou’s Material? 

Welcome back to the internet, Benny, and thank you, National Review, for forever proving us wrong when we believe you can sink no lower. Congratulations to you both on your most unholy union. In honor of this momentous occasion, let us now copy and paste someone else's words so we do not have to write our own, while "accidentally" "forgetting" to give credit where it is due:

Benny Johnson to National Review pulls off the impressive feat of making both Benny Johnson AND National Review worse.

Just kidding, we are not assholes, we would never steal someone's words because WE ARE NOT ASSHOLES. Please direct all praise to legitimately deeply original Jamison Foser .

[ Politico ]