Belling Misfires Pitch At Doyle
Mark Belling aimed a dustoff pitch at Gov. Jim Doyle in a Waukesha Freeman column the other day, but it was just another Belling wild pitch.
Belling's column is a rant, in familiar talk radio style, this time directed against Frank Busalacchi, Doyle's embattled transportation department secretary.
But Belling piles it on, accusing Busalacchi of leading former Mayor John Norquist's "goon squad" on the Summerfest Board of Directors.
As errors go, this one's a whopper.
Busalacchi was doing such a good job raking Norquist over the coals as chairman of the stadium board that Black added Busalacchi to the Summerfest board, and made him vice-chairman, to give him another platform from which to jab the Mayor.
Norquist never controlled the board: Most of the Summerfest board, in fact, was hand-picked by Black, who eventually lost control of the board, and her job, because she was too controversial despite her long career building up the festival.
Calling Norquist a Nazi looked unprofessional on Black's part, for example, but the bottom line is, and I can't figure out how the well-informed Belling missed all this: Busalacchi was not a Norquist appointee or a friend on the Summerfest board.
3 comments:
As someone who was a Norquist appointee to the board for five years, I can confirm that. Busalacchi became board chairman and we clashed at every meeting. He was Bo's biggest defender for awhile, but eventually saw that she was being unreasonable. Then he was instrumental in getting a new lease negotiated and signed.
And, yes, about 2/3 of the board was always hand-picked by Bo. The fact that the board still ended her contract tells you how bad things had gotten.
I agree, Belling is more well-informed than he lets on. But he also doesn't care if he gets something wrong if he is trying to prove a point (or, in this case, piling on). Whether he knows better or not, it doesn't matter --he knows his listeners/readers don't. He is the king of the repeated lie that becomes accepted as fact.
My goal is to get the accurate information circulated and to try and make sure that what is wrong doesn't become accepted as fact.
It'd be impossible to track and cull all the bad information that floats into the ether and listeners' heads from talk radio, but since Belling put this one into print, it has some permanence and should be challenged.
Fixed would be asking too much.
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