Douglas Whaley

I keep running into people who tell me that they won’t vote for Hillary because she’s so “crooked” or “dishonest” or “corrupt.”  My handyman told me this, and so did a nurse during a medical procedure I was recently enduring.  To both of them I replied that I’m a Hillary supporter, but I’d never vote for someone who fit any of those descriptions.  What exactly did she do to earn these labels?  Hey, I’m a lawyer—I want facts before I make up my mind. My questions produced puzzled silence.  “Well, everyone says that” was more or less the reply I always get.  “Do you believe everything you hear without checking?” is mine.  Hillary has flaws, of course, as any candidate would.  She mishandled her emails badly, but the intensive investigations of this brouhaha concluded that she did nothing criminally wrong and was only guilty of bad judgment.  If you don’t vote for her for that reason, okay.  But if bad jud...

As I’ve explained before, my father’s side of the family were English/Scottish, and my ancestry-minded sister, Mary Beth Colpitts, has traced the Whaleys back to the Battle of Hastings and before; see “A Whaley at the Battle of Hastings: The Fun of Genealogy,” February 22, 2016; http://douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2016/02/a-whaley-at-battle-of-hastings-fun-of.html ]. My mother’s side of the family, the Kunkels, were pure Germans, coming to this country from Bavaria in the 1840s and settling in the City of Jasper in southern Indiana.  They were devout Catholics, and many of their descendants still are, producing very large families.  Here is a picture of my mother, Lenore Kunkel Whaley, with me and my great grandparents, Philip and Matilda Kunkel.  I vaguely remember them because they had a large parrot who screamed “ Pa, Phone! ” whenever the telephone rang. Their son Jerome Kunkel, who, later in life (when he decided to run for mayor of...

I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but I’ve had over 50 surgeries in my life.  By “surgeries” I mean any procedure in which medical cutting was done on my body.    Some of these were small (cataract surgeries in both eyes) or lasik surgery, for example, but others were major (most obviously the heart transplant in 2009).    The first happened when I was in second grade and had my tonsils removed, and the most recent was last week when I had a cyst removed from my pancreas.    I ruptured my appendix in 1978 and this led to my belly being sliced open six times in major surgeries; for the blog post on point see   http: //douglaswhaley.blogspot.com/2010/08/first-time-i-nearly-died.html .    Then, before the heart transplant, there occurred much slicing open of my upper chest to take in and pull out a defibrillator (it kept malfunctioning).    At one point I had major problems with my nose which led to my turbinat...

“Horrible but fascinating, and hard not to stare at over and over.”     That’s my analogy between Donald Trump running for president and closely inspecting one’s own badly infected big toe.  My blog is usually about things other than politics, as steady readers will certainly know, but in 2016 I keep coming back to The Donald because he’s mesmerizing.  I promise to stop, at least for awhile, and in the future write about other topics, but right now I can’t stop marveling at the impossibility that this madness is really going on. There is no way anything as outrageous as the Donald Trump campaign could be this close to the presidency of the United States, with the man at its top so outrageously unqualified for the office—that scenario surely is fiction, or a joke, or a skit on Saturday Night Live, or a ridiculous dream.  Like huge numbers of people the world over, I find myself guiltily rubbernecking at this traffic wreck in progress, not quit...

THE HAPPY COUPLE Newt Donald Trump has gotten where he is by trusting his instincts to outpace the common hoard by doing outrageous and over-the-top things to attract attention, demonstrating he’s a very different candidate than those the Republican party has forwarded since Lincoln, its first.  Therefore it’s interesting to watch him make a mistake when choosing a vice presidential mate and going for what he assumes is the “safe” and “responsible” choice, as traditional Republicans urged him strongly to do.  My guess is that Donald’s gut pushed him to tap Newt Gingrich, upsetting a lot of responsible Republicans but in keeping with Trump as Trump.  Gingrich (intelligent, experienced, half mad) would have filled the usual role of VP candidate job as “attack dog” with canine ferocity approaching “wolf.” Mike Pence is more poodle.  Sure, on cue he’ll yap fiercely, but he has all the gravitas of a vaguely animated corpse, not quite alive, tr...