Annals of right-wing skulduggery: Failed Dutch right-wing blog gets money from the government for failing!

If there's one thing right-wingers know how to do, it's squeeze money out of government -- yes, the very government whose spending they so loudly and righteously decry. I hope you're sitting down for this pip of a story, passed on by our friends at the English-language Dutch blog PoliGazette.

Outrageous: Failed Dutch Blog Receives 170,000 Euro Bailout
June 29th, 2009 | By: Michael van der Galien

Several weeks ago, influential Dutch conservative blog De Dagelijkse Standaard broke the news that another wannabe rightist blog (PlustPost.nl -- I won’t link to it, see below) owned by Grimbert Rost van Tonningen -- who happens to be a millionaire -- was doing so badly that the owner asked the Dutch government for a bailout (in the form of a loan). That's not a joke. The Dutch government has a budget to bail out struggling media organizations that "make a difference."

PlusPost was founded by Rost van Tonningen, who hoped it would quickly become one of the most prominent rightist blogs in the Netherlands. He and his business friends invested heavily in it but, after many months, still fail to top 1500 unique visits on good days, mostly because the website is extremely boring. In fact, June was the blog's best month thus far, with an average of just about 30,000 visitors in total. That is 1000 a day on average. Basically, that's what reasonably good blogs have if they publish one-and-a-half posts per week.

This while Van Tonningen said earlier that PlusPost has to have at least four times as many unique visitors each month in order to be able to pay for the costs it makes -- its editors, etc. all make money for doing absolutely nothing and, when they do write something, they write about issues that interest no one.

Today, the responsible department told DDS that PlusPost will receive the bailout it requested. The struggling blog -- which pretends to be rightist (for the free market, small government, individual freedoms, etc.) -- will receive 170,000 euro. That is $238,000.

Who pays for that? The taxpayer of course. The Dutch taxpayer, who works hard every day to make a living, who struggles to keep his head above water due to the severe economic crisis, pays for a failed blog owned by a millionaire.

That's bad, isn't it? But wait, there's more. The bailout is a loan only if PlusPost succeeds. If it fails -- and it will because it is still not able to reach its ridiculously low target of 5.000 unique visits a day simply because its owner doesn’t understand blogging one bit -- Van Tonningen has to pay back exactly… nothing.

In other words, it's a win-win situation for the millionaire turned failed blogger. He can't lose. PlusPost fails, he loses the taxpayers' rather than his own money. If he succeeds, he'll pay it back in two years time. By the way, it's safe to forget about that second scenario, for PlusPost will never -- and I do mean never -- succeed. As said, its owner doesn’t understand blogging, nor blogreaders, and he pretends to be rightist while he’s clearly nothing but an opportunist; people see through that.

It’s outrageous.

The moral, presumably, is that when you've got one of these SOBs down, don't offer him a helping hand, offer him a swift kick in the groin. You know, just the way Jesus would.

#