I’m going to spend the last few hours of 2012 with my family and some friends and hopefully forget about all of the bad news for just a little while. The latest on the fiscal cliff is that there are no spending cuts, even though President Alinsky Obama makes it sound like he’s bent over backwards in the negotiations. What a joke.

Goodbye to 2012. It wasn’t much of a good year for conservatives, and 2013 probably won’t be much better. Oh well, if you want to get a few laughs out of it all check out Dave Barry’s year end review.

It was a cruel, cruel year — a year that kept raising our hopes, only to squash them flatter than a dead possum on the interstate.

Example: This year the “reality” show Jersey Shore, which for six hideous seasons has been a compelling argument in favor of a major earth-asteroid collision, finally got canceled, and we dared to wonder if maybe, just maybe, we, as a society, were becoming slightly less stupid.

But then, WHAP, we were slapped in our national face by the cold hard frozen mackerel of reality in the form of the hugely popular new “reality” show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which, in terms of intellectual content, makes Jersey Shore look like Hamlet.

Another example: As the year began, the hottest recording artist was the brilliant singer-songwriter Adele, whose popularity made us think that maybe, just maybe, after years of rewarding overhyped auto-tuned dreck, we were finally developing more sophisticated musical tastes, and then …

WHAP, we were assaulted from all sides by the monster megahit video Gangnam Style, in which a Korean man prances around a variety of bizarre Korean settings riding an imaginary Korean horse and shouting a song that, except for the words “Eh, sexy lady,” is entirely in Korean.

Read the whole thing.

Happy New Year to you all. I wish you good health and prosperity in 2013. The politicians are doing everything possible to keep that from happening, but who knows, maybe we can outsmart them. Or get lucky. Or something. Anyway, enjoy and stay safe!

Update: For a few giggles check out Maggie’s Notebook where you can find the Twitter exchange of the year. Also, be sure to see the worst examples of media coverage 2012. Not quite as funny, but worth a read.