Nothing quite like a show of brotherly love

It’s been over a year since I started writing this column. Tom McDonald, the publisher and editor of The New Mexico News Exchange (and my brother), went from agreeing to let me write a few to letting me write a weekly column.

Now I am told I have four newspapers publishing me on a regular basis. I figure there’s another 10 or 20 papers running my column that I haven’t been told about.

The editor (Tom) writes the headlines for the articles, butchers my words with his editing and often writes snide comments hidden in the “tag line” at the end of my column.

But come on, Tom, did you have to call me a “knucklehead” and “a legend in (my) own mind?” Furthermore you compared me to a gorilla and a dog. You even said I follow the “dog’s law” and all you have to do to make me happy is place a “feedbag around my neck.”

For those who do not know, the dog’s law, as I explained in an article that Tom titled “Stepping in the truths of Dog’s Law:” is “(1) If it smells, eat it; (2) if it doesn’t move, urinate on it: and (3) if it does move, hump it.”

As to my writing abilities, he says I “ramble too much” but he lets me anyway “just to keep (me) happy” and that I “steal jokes” and am an “insensitive psychiatrist.” Maybe, but did he have to e-mail me about one of my articles: “Your wrap-up is not really that funny, if you ask me, and you don’t have to ask me because I’m your editor and I can tell you anyway, this ending sucks … Deal with it, crybaby.”

He even wrote that my “entire family hates” me, they “laugh at me, not with me,” and I am an “embarrassment.” I never asked my family if this was true, as they would have probably agreed with Tom, but he still should not have said it in print.

As for my presidential campaign, he told all of my readers: “Don’t vote for him” and that “everything in the story is true except nearly all of it.” He also said I have never “run for an office.” Not true, I was elected junior and senior high youth president for our church, student council representative for my high school, and in medical school, I was elected president of the family practice club.

The last one turned out to be somewhat of an embarrassment as I changed my career path to psychiatry. I was not re-elected.

Tom even insulted my intelligence, saying I “barely passed kindergarten and medical school.” Let me set the record straight, I had no problem passing kindergarten.

After calculating my readership numbers, he said I use “alien math” and once called me “the greatest exaggerator on earth.” Sounds a little like jealousy.

I’ll admit, I have said a few things about Tom too. I pointed out that he once left out the “L” in public and wrote an announcement calling for a “pubic meeting.” In fairness to Tom, however, that mistake probably increased the turnout.

I also quoted Dad, who said, “my boys were all accidents except for Tom, and he was the biggest mistake of the bunch.”

As for the name-calling, I did very little, with the exception of calling him “terrible Tom” and later a “lowdown, opportunistic, bottom-feeding scumbag.”

But he’s my brother so I’ll be the adult and continue to tolerate him. After all, he needs me.

Don McDonald writes for Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]