Swiftboating? Moi?

Bruce Jackson writes in this week’s Artvoice:

The BuffaloPundit blog, anti-casino in the past, came out against the Wendt foundation on July 13. It’s posting for that day was headlined,“Margaret Went Foundation.” Under that was a pretty color picture of a casino at night with “Keeps Joel Rose” in the top left corner and “Up at night” in the bottom right corner. The remainder of the posting was a listing of fundable activities and grant recipients from the Wendt Foundation Web page and an attack on the foundation for its support of the lawsuit. On July 22 the site posted a photograph of Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic under a caption saying, “Here’s what the Butcher of Sarajevo looks like nowadays.” Under the picture was a caption saying, “Rumor has it the Wendt Foundation is paying him $1,000,000 to fight a casino in downtown Buffalo.”

1. Thanks for the plug.

2. I was never anti-casino, per se. I was anti-carving-out-sovereign-exclaves-in-Buffalo-for-gambling-purposes. Even Skretny upheld the sovereign exclave bit. I’ve never subscribed to the moralistic or economic arguments against a casino.

3. My post spelled “Wendt” correctly – Artvoice didn’t. Although “Went” is clever.

4. The Karadzic crack – for the humor-challenged – was about likening Joel Rose’s beard to Karadzic’s hirsute disguise. Not likening CACGEC to Republika Srpska. I realize now that it could have been taken that way, and I’m sorry.

Perhaps the most surprising attack on the foundation was Michael Beebe’s July 20 article in the Buffalo News, which begins innocently enough with a listing of some Wendt grantees: Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House and Graycliff, the Roycroft campus in East Aurora, the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. The foundation has funded, writes Beebe, “hundreds of social programs through churches, the YMCA, the Boys and Girls Club, the Boy Scouts of America and the United Way. In each of the thousands of Wendt grants over the years, the philosophy has been the same: step in when government or other means of funding are not there, and do it as low-key as possible.”

Then Beebe’s tone changes: “Suddenly, though, the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation finds itself at the center of controversy.”

How, exactly, is the Wendt Foundation in the “center of controversy”? Primarily by being in this article written by Beebe, which is headlined “Wendt in the middle of casino battle: Foundation aids foes with $1.9 million.” This is a newspaper article that defines and creates its own subject, a journalistic tautology.

Who is making the charges occasioning the article? Beebe refers to them only generically: “Talk-show hosts and bloggers have criticized the foundation for the $1.9 million it has spent so far funding the lawsuit against the Seneca Nation of Indians’ Buffalo Creek Casino in Buffalo.”

Talk-show hosts? Which ones? The rational ones or the fruitcakes? The analyzers or the frothers? Since when is criticism by a talk-show host the subject of a long piece by anybody in the news section of the Buffalo News? A dozen of those criticisms are aired on Buffalo talk radio every day and the News pays them no attention at all. Why now? Beebe told me in an email that he’d “heard snippets of Sandy Beach’s show…the day the casino decision came down” and that many of the blog comments he’d seen referred to “the same July 8 Sandy Beach show, in which they said he demonized the opposition.” The Buffalo News is going after the Margaret L. Wendt Foundation because Sandy Beach kvetched about it?

Bloggers? Beebe names none of them. Search the Buffalo blogs and you’ll find a lot of comments on the casino litigation (much of it by the same few people writing the same letters again and again), but hardly any, other than BuffaloPundit, going after the Wendt Foundation.

I’ll note for the record that Jackson doesn’t ever defend the Wendt Foundation’s use of $2 million to fund the casino lawsuit. Apart from confirming that how the foundation spends it money is up to its trustees, he only attacks its critics. I think that speaks for itself, and that the underlying point – that the Wendt Foundation certainly could have found better uses for $2 million – remains quite salient indeed.

More troubling, Jackson poses the suggestion that there is a conspiratorial, concerted effort to “Swiftboat” the Wendt Foundation.

Is all of this—Scott Brown’s WGRZ story (which has no ascriptions), Michael Beebe’s Buffalo News story (which has no ascriptions), the blog posts (nearly all of them under assumed names, many of them using the same language to make the same bogus charges again and again)—mere coincidence or is it a concerted effort to put public pressure on the one significant source of funding open to the casino opponents? Is it an expression of community concern or is it, at least in part, organized and deliberate? Is it swiftboating?

The most workable definition of “swiftboating” I’ve found is on the Urban Dictionary Web site: “A political ploy whereby allegations, falsehoods, exaggerations, or distortions are publicized to discredit a person or entity and have the intended effect that public attention is drawn to the ensuing controversy about the veracity of the allegations and away from some other political embarrassment.”

What a steaming load of horseshit. Bruce Jackson could have easily contacted me via email to ask me whether I had acted in concert with anyone in posting what I did about the Wendt Foundation, but did not. What I do on this site is comment on news events that interest me. I saw the Wendt Foundation story at WGRZ, heard them talk about it on WBEN, and decided to do a post about it because it troubled me, too. Jackson ought to retract his brain-farted supposition or else produce some evidence that I conspired with Channel 2 or WBEN to write something critical of the Wendt Foundation.

Also, in comments to the posted Artvoice piece, Joel Rose doesn’t understand how I know what keeps him up at night.

It’s a joke. It’s a picture of the proposed casino, and I suggest that it keeps you up at night.

I wonder what $2 million could have bought for the poor, underfunded, unconnected, and unprivileged in WNY.