Ben Trovato

Hilarious piece at the Federalist

……I first heard of Ben Trovato while reading a curious little volume of unusual word origins. A number of these supposed etymologies, most of the really colorful ones, were attributed to “Ben Trovato.” The name is taken from an old Italian saying: se non è vero, è ben trovato. Roughly translated: if it’s not true, it’s a good story. These were the kind of word origins that you really wanted to be true, but for which there was no real evidence. In contemporary parlance, they are “too good to check.”

I think you can begin to see why 2014 has been the year of Ben Trovato. It has been a year full of things that were non vero, but which had really good narratives. Or at least really convenient narratives.

It may not actually be true that Michael Brown had his hands up and was saying “don’t shoot” when a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer shot him—the bulk of the eyewitness testimony and physical evidence indicates otherwise—but “hands up, don’t shoot” is still a great slogan because it’s such a good “metaphor” and captures a “larger truth.” Ben Trovato at work.

Like Al Sharpton, Ben Trovato has frequently been invited to the White House, where he spent some time hanging out with the son Barack Obama might have had, before swinging over to the First Lady’s office, where he prompted Michelle Obama to describe how an incident at a Target store shows that she still needs to fear being mistaken for the help because she’s black. Proof of America’s persistent racism. Sure, she told the same story a few years ago with a totally opposite meaning. But you’re missing the point. The point is that the new version of the story is well constructed to convey an important narrative. It has Ben Trovato’s fingerprints all over it.

Of course, Ben doesn’t get much in the way of official credit or acknowledgement, much like Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare architect no one has ever heard of before. Gruber didn’t get in trouble for stretching the truth, he got in trouble for being just a little too truthful about the dishonest way ObamaCare was drafted and shoved through Congress. In doing so, he revealed that ObamaCare has been a giant Ben Trovato operation all along.

Ben was, of course, up to his neck in the upheaval at the University of Virginia, where everybody forgot about Charlottesville’s real-life rapist and serial killer and spent weeks in a frenzy over a rape accusation that was not only false but had its corroborating details plagiarized from “Dawson’s Creek.”

Crime journalism is one of Ben’s favorite fields and he continued his illustrious career with his role in Serial, a popular true-crime radio series in which an NPR journalist set out to exonerate a convicted murderer by publicly re-examining every little detail of his case, eventually coming up with, um, nothing that actually exonerates him. Oh well, at least it was a good story, or so I’m told…..

http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/30/my-person-of-the-year-ben-trovato/