… because he seems to take himself way more seriously than he deserves. If showed any reasonable ability to take himself lightly, he would be amusing instead of so obnoxious. I know we’ve been around this topic before, in talking about his trade-mongering. I know you are able to take it exactly for it’s worth — that it’s all just speculation — and keep it in perspective, but just from reading him, it’s obvious to me that he’s using it to get people to take his blog (and himself) more seriously than it (and he) deserves. And there are people gullible enough to fall for it.

The same with his over-the-top antics. If he showed any degree of self-awareness about how ridiculous he’s being, I might even enjoy reading him. But he seems dead serious in his wailing and gnashing of teeth, and this after it’s clear that the Kings are having their most successful season in almost a decade. And so only two conclusions about Barry make any sense to me:

1) He sees nothing wrong with urinating into other people’s breakfast cereal. Which is just malicious. Not that he doesn’t have a right to express his opinion, but it’s still malicious.

2) He sees nothing wrong with inflicting his psychological dysfunction (and I mean that in a literal, clinical sense) on everyone else. Which, at best, is just rude. And, at worst, is malicious.

I acknowledge that crazy can have its charms, but it’s a high-risk rhetorical strategy. If you can’t carry it off, it’s an epic fail. Barry doesn’t have the talent or the self-awareness or the intelligence to pull off crazy and make it work. There’s no reason for him to say that stuff in the way he says it except to make his readers feel as miserable as he does.

I also acknowledge that it was rather much for me to say that he deserves to be punched in the face. But he definitely deserves to be slapped, in the sense that the old chivalric code used it as a way of demonstrating to a man that he didn’t deserve respect.