Dave Barry's Year in Review: 2019 was an 'eventful' -- bad -- year

[erronis]

https://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article238523668.html

An egregious example of "both-siderism". I'm surprised, coming from Barry.

It was an extremely eventful year.

We are using “eventful” in the sense of “bad.”

It was a year so eventful that every time another asteroid whizzed past the Earth, barely avoiding a collision that would have destroyed human civilization, we were not 100 percent certain it was good news.

We could not keep up with all the eventfulness. Every day, we’d wake up to learn that some new shocking alleged thing had allegedly happened, and before we had time to think about it, the political-media complex, always in Outrage Condition Red, would explode in righteous fury, with Side A and Side B hurling increasingly nasty accusations at each other and devoting immense energy to thinking up ways to totally DESTROY the other side on Twitter, a medium that has the magical power to transform everything it touches, no matter how stupid it is, into something even stupider.

FACT: This year O.J. Simpson got a Twitter account, and the reaction of nearly a million people was: “What? The attention-seeking psychopath who got away with murdering two innocent people wants followers? Count me in!”

Speaking of attention-seeking psychopaths: The epicenter of the year’s eventfulness was of course Washington, D.C., an endlessly erupting scandal volcano, belching out dense swirling smoke-plumes of spin, rumor, innuendo, misdirection and lies emitted by both sides, A and B — or, if you prefer, B and A — filling the air with vicious rhetoric, always delivered with the pious insistence that OUR side, unlike the OTHER side, is motivated not by ego, power-lust, greed or hatred, but by a selfless desire to Work For The American People.

Meanwhile, from out beyond the Beltway, the actual American people warily watched the perpetual tantrum that was supposed to be their government. And more and more their reaction, whatever side they considered themselves to be on, was: Nah.

[underpants]

1. 👀

Always love his end of the year piece

[Top 10 Idiots]

2. You can also check out the Top 10 Conservative Idiots Year In Review while you're at it!

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212795573

[voteearlyvoteoften]

3. Knr 🥳

[coti]

4. Yeah, I've been a huge fan of Barry's for a long time. Really disappointing given our context

and political situation. But he's always had a "bothsider" strain in him, for as long as I can remember.

[cwydro]

5. I love Barry.

Hit a paywall trying to read that, darn it.

[erronis]

6. Really? I didn't see a paywall. Try opening in an "incognito" window.

I tend to block a lot of 3rd party stuff and usually use a VPN but that shouldn't make any difference.

I think I posted all of the text from the article since I didn't believe it was protected.

[appalachiablue]

7. The last time I saw him was a CSpan lecture where he exploited

the more quirky side of South Florida to a howling So Cal audience that ate it up.

Yeah, both sides. I used to like him and his work, ran into him in the airport once on the way to FL.