It is easy to write off the Washington Post as irretrievably biased, and yet, sometimes they do something quite even-handed. We have at hand an example of the latter sort, concerning the (bad) neighborly atttack on Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
The author seems to have made a good faith effort to understand what moved the neighbor to blind-side Paul, knocking him to the ground and breaking 6 ribs. The two physician neighbors had marginally different standards of yard maintenance, though nobody seems to believe these reached anywhere near the level of fisticuffs. Their politics were quite different, but probably not the issue.
Paul is a prickly iconoclast and, as such, easy to dislike as he willfully goes his own way on many issues before the Senate. It is easy to imagine having a committed libertarian as a neighbor might be challenging.
On the other hand, the much less well-known neighbor who attacked him is shown to have been in a slow-motion spiral of emotional deterioration as his life fell apart bit by bit. Neighbor Rene Boucher’s life gradually became less and less the tidy affair his OCD-like proclivities would have preferred. A long-time marriage gone south, grown children moved out of state, hassles with other neighbors, and attempts to sell his home falling through with potential home buyers sued.
Reading between the lines you see the picture of a control freak losing control gradually until he snapped. Not wishing to be sued, author Justin Jouvenal allows us to draw that conclusion from likely accurate data points he’s unearthed.
*Used here in the football sense.
