The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy Strikes…

Via Atrios, we learn that RedState is in trouble because its not a liberal blog… or something.

When we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us.

If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Well, we didn’t close down. We ditched Scoop and moved to the best alternative at the time, a program called Drupal. But, in accomplishing the switch, budget constraints forced us to sacrifice some popular site features in order to alleviate the strain on our overused servers.

Needless to say, we always regarded those “downgrades” as temporary, and we hoped to restore the eliminated features – and to add new and even better ones – as soon as we could afford to.

Unfortunately, we still can’t afford to. But we’re convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So we’ve decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand – hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

I’ve included more than I needed to so there’s no suggestion that somehow I’ve taken this out of context. Frankly, I blame George W. Bush… with deeper tax cuts Scoop would have fixed itself. But in all seriousness… as part of the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, I was wondering – am I supposed to be getting some freebies of some sort?

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Update… edited the first and last paragraphs slightly.

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Update 2…

In comments, One Salient Oversight notes:

Actually the funny thing is that both Scoop and Drupal are open source software. You’d think with Redstate’s love of capitalism that they would’ve used proprietary software.

Nikki points out that the letter sent by Erick from RedState to readers (text at the Atrios link in the post) is actually more damning, beginning with this:

The bad news: our liberal “friends” – you know, the ones who believe so strongly in free speech and open debate – have done what they can to prevent us from making these improvements, so that our influence will be minimized just as we head into the 2008 presidential primary season.

No, our Blue State buddies haven’t succeeded in stopping us from improving our website. But they’ve made it more difficult and more expensive – which is why I’m coming to you for help.

Howard sends us to Kos:

Want to know the worst of it?

I had offered RedState a technology swap — they could have all of our improvements if their developer helped with some patches and whanot. I saw this as a way to spread out the costs of improving the platform amongst various sites.

But that doesn’t fit their narrative of being “censored” by those crazy liberals.

So in other words, as ludicrous as their charge was — that they were being censored because no liberals offered to help them — IT’S NOT EVEN TRUE!

Aside from that, didn’t Eagle Publishing buy them? The Regnery folks have a lot of money.