(McClatchy article funny and WORTH reading): Dave Barry’s Year in Review: 2016 — What the ... ?

Submitted by Amanda Matthews on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 11:06am

Dave Barry’s Year in Review: 2016 — What the ... ?

In the future, Americans — assuming there are any left — will look back at 2016 and remark: “What the HELL?”
They will have a point. Over the past few decades, we here at the Year in Review have reviewed some pretty disturbing years. For example, there was 2000, when the outcome of a presidential election was decided by a tiny group of deeply confused Florida residents who had apparently attempted to vote by chewing on their ballots.

And we voters did our part, passing judgment on the candidates, thinning the herd, rejecting them one by one. Sometimes we had to reject them more than once; John Kasich didn’t get the message until his own staff felled him with tranquilizer darts. But eventually we eliminated the contenders whom we considered to be unqualified or disagreeable, whittling our choices down until only two major candidates were left. And out of all the possibilities, the two that We, the People, in our collective wisdom, deemed worthy of competing for the most important job on Earth, turned out to be …

… drum roll …
… the most flawed, sketchy and generally disliked duo of presidential candidates ever!
Yes. After all that, the American people, looking for a leader, ended up with a choice between ointment and suppository. The fall campaign was an unending national nightmare, broadcast relentlessly on cable TV. CNN told us over and over that Donald Trump was a colossally ignorant, narcissistic, out-of-control sex-predator buffoon; Fox News countered that Hillary Clinton was a greedy, corrupt, coldly calculating liar of massive ambition and minimal accomplishment. And in our hearts we knew the awful truth: They were both right.
lt wasn’t just bad. It was the Worst. Election. Ever

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article123749584.h...

end of article EXCEPT FOR ONE REASON THAT I JUST CAN't help but have sad/mirthful feeling about:

FROM THE ARTICLE on his list of other things that were wrong wrong wrong in 2016:
*
Musically, we lost Prince, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, George Michael and Debbie Reynolds; we gained the suicide-inducing TV commercial in which Jon Bon Jovi screeches about turning back time.
*

Tags:

Dave Barry 2016 Sucked

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Comments

Submitted by Big Al on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 1:00pm

The worst election ever.

I don't think it's gonna get any better.

Submitted by riverlover on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 5:21pm

Two fish swimming in a pot. Set to boil.

Which one would you prefer? Now we know. no one is exstatic. Welcome to 2017. And stay calm, with knees tensed.

—

Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Submitted by Writerinres on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 1:33pm

A thousand thank-you's, Amanda.

So funny in parts, I choked on my coffee and sent my dog running in panic from my room to the safety of a closet thinking: 'My favorite Hooman's become a Hillarybot.' Who knew that humor could be wrung from Hillary's second run for woman president and the Clinton Foundation?

Submitted by Amanda Matthews on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 7:05pm

You are so very welcome. I just roared when I read it and even

though economics has got me back to the Communication Device Designed by Satan himself ( aka the iPhone ) I just couldn't resist, I HAD to post it. And I thought what a perfect article for C99. We all said said how horrible they both were, more than once. And 2016 did suck.

—

I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

Submitted by Crider on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 2:18pm

Thanks!

I love those retrospectives -- especially in this year. You might also be interested in this from Friend Dog Studios:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z04M6NhkIKk]

Submitted by riverlover on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 5:25pm

'Did you remember to vote?'

Oh, yesss.

—

Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Submitted by CB on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 2:29pm

All is not lost. We CAN make America great again!

Dmitry over at ClubOrlov has a wonderful idea on how to make America great again. I think the plan has tremendous promise. Trump will be the ideal president for this project. He has already stated repeatedly that the U.S. needs to block all oil imports from Saudi Arabia. The MIC will also get on board with this plan. It's a wet dream come true for them. What could be more financially rewarding than using US manufactured arms to destroy US manufactured arms?

The plan also solves many other problems we have been having in that neck of the woods. It's so great, even the Russians, Chinese and Iranians will jump on board.

How to Make America Great Again with Other People’s Money
A lot of the sharper-minded commentators have recently started pointing out a problem with Donald Trump’s plan to “make America great again”: lack of funds. The US is bankrupt: sinking ever-further into unrepayable debt, unable to achieve a rate of economic growth that could ever catch up with its growing debt burden. It is in the midst of a giant financial bubble that is propped up by various scams and rackets, from car loans whose term exceeds the useful lifetime of the car, to retirement fund shortfalls caused by effectively negative interest rates, to educational debt that condemns ever more young people to a lifetime of indentured servitude, to the medical racket which is now eating up over 20% of the economy while delivering some of the worst levels of well-being in the entire developed world… Attempts to fix any of these problems would inevitably run into long-standing, intractable political conflicts and contradictions and go nowhere while also bursting the financial bubble and turning the political realm into one very large and angry poop party. Better not even go there!
...
What President-elect Trump needs is a shovel-ready project to redirect meaningful amounts of imperial loot toward the homeland—enough to make some number of shiny baubles and fancy gewgaws to hand out to people as symbols of rekindled greatness. The problem is, what is there left to loot?...
...
And so, by a process of elimination, we arrive at the only obvious choice: the Persian Gulf monarchies, with Saudi Arabia as the big prize. Of course, Saudi Arabia is a US protectorate, and owes its existence to a deal struck in 1945 by King Abdulaziz ibn Saud and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But that’s no problem: the antebellum south was America’s through and through but that didn’t prevent the north from attacking it. All it would take is a dramatic foreign policy change announcement: “Saudi Arabia not good. President Trump very disappointed.”
...
If Trump doesn’t crack open the chocolate egg that is Saudi Arabia and run off with the toy inside, then somebody else will. Saudi Arabia’s days are numbered. For now, it is still rich in money, oil, sand and imbeciles, but it is burning through the first two faster and faster. Just wait a decade or so, and the sand and the imbeciles will be all that’s left. Somebody will try to get to them and snatch what’s left of the prize well before then. It might as well be the Americans: they started this shambolic desert kingdom; they might as well be the ones to put it out of its misery.

Submitted by native on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 5:22pm

I propose that Trump could help

to Make America Great Again by importing SAND from Saudi Arabia, to refurbish the eroding beaches all along our eastern coast. As it is, we are losing millions of tons of valuable real estate every year, which is a national disgrace. America is now literally becoming SMALLER, and we cannot allow this to continue, lest Florida itself be washed away! Such an expansionist project would not only provide much needed relief to our tourist industry, it would also be a boon to the global shipping industry, and to hundreds of hoteliers, casino investors, and small businesses whose prosperity depends on keeping our wide, bather-friendly beaches functional.

KSA has plenty of sand, enough to keep us supplied for many centuries. Eventually we might even be able to excavate the entire Kingdom, and thus get that much closer to all the valuable oil that lies beneath it. A win/win proposition Mr. President... to fight back against climate change!

—

native

Submitted by Amanda Matthews on Wed, 01/04/2017 - 8:52am

The House of Saud are a bunch of terrorist-supporting thugs BUT

I often wonder what kind of shitstorm would occur if it fell. There's literally thousands of that bunch in that family bleeding the country dry. What would happen if the people became so disaffected and angry they actually turned on them? Would the damn Imams starting setting government policies? Would it go full-bore theocratic? What really happens when it goes down? And what about the blow-back if we help it happen? The US isn't held in real high regard by quite a few of the 'folks' in the Middle East. Especially if they attended a wedding party that we droned and they survived.

I worry about Saudi Arabia and what happens next.

—

I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

Submitted by MsGrin on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 3:22pm

Dave Barry Never Gets Old

Well, seems to me he published a book about turning 40 when I was in grad school, so by Boomer standards, I guess he's been old for a long time now... but I digress.

Best line:

But Clinton faces an unexpectedly strong challenge from Bernie Sanders, a feisty 217-year-old Vermont senator with a message of socialism, but the good kind of socialism where everybody gets a lot of free stuff, not the kind where starving people fight over who gets the lone remaining beet at the co-op.

—

'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member

Submitted by Carol Joy on Tue, 01/03/2017 - 9:11pm

Barry is not just funny -

He can amazingly pull a joke out of his ass and make even us Sanders supporters crack up.
"217 years old." If anyone could run and run and run the way Sanders did at age 217, Bernie would be the one.

—

Believing in the improbable can make your life a miracle.

Submitted by shaharazade on Wed, 01/04/2017 - 4:55pm

Thanks Amanda

that was really funny. It made tears of laughter come to my eyes. The non political events and news were also hilarious. Hard to pick my favorite part. But this one was up there.

Responding to charges from the Sanders camp that the Democratic National Committee is tipping the scales in Clinton’s favor, chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz states that “the DNC is scrupulously neutral in the contest between Secretary Clinton and the senile Commie fart.”

Submitted by Amanda Matthews on Thu, 01/05/2017 - 2:46pm

This shows my age but WTF, I've come to love DAVE Barry almost

as much as I loved loved loved Mike Royko. And I really enjoy Garrison Keillor too.

I've always bee fascinated by how those kind of writers could take a subject, any subject, and show the darkest side of our natures using humor or maybe more accurately, sarcastic irony tinged with dark but hilarious comedy, and make it more biting, revealing, and readable than anything those hair-on-fire liars at The New York Tripe or The Washington Pustule could ever do.

—

I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa