Patrick White
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Sep. 03, 2008 12:00AM EDT Last updated on Friday, Mar. 13, 2009 10:23AM EDT
Kids grow up so fast these days.
Not long ago, he was just a small-town hunk with a bad case of hockey hair. According to his MySpace page, he loved camping, fishing and riding dirt bikes. He wasn't much for babies ("I don't want kids") or political optics: "Ya fuck with me I'll kick ass," the page says.
Today, 18-year-old Levi Johnston is the brunt of a massive Internet roast that could sway the U.S. presidential election.
His girlfriend has a baby on the way, and she just happens to be the daughter of Sarah Palin, the woman John McCain picked as his veep, in part for her conservative family values.
All of a sudden, bloggers the world over are swooning over the Wasilla, Alaska, teen.
"HOW HOT IS THE BABY DADDY?" gushed New York magazine's blog. "John McCain is definitely winning the cougar vote now."
The gossip site Gawker.com identified Mr. Johnston in pictures that show a young man holding a shotgun and brandishing his middle finger.
A Phoenix Web developer, also named Levi Johnston, posted a mock diary. "Hi, I'm Levi Johnston," it starts. "I'm 16 years old, and I live in Alaska (burr, it's cold)."
It then weaves from his meeting Bristol Palin to "Holy shizzles, Bristol's pregnant!"
The Alaskan teen's MySpace page was taken down yesterday, but the damage had been done.
"I'm a little bit surprised the campaign didn't ask him to take these pages down," said Daniel Solove, author of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. "It's become a very distracting sideshow."
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