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| D'Souza in NY 2012 - Photo by Bryan Pace - NY Daily News |
The bespectacled Mumbai-born Dartmouth grad is under indictment by a Federal Grand Jury for illegally helping to channel individual cash donations well in excess of U.S. Federal election law limits to Republican Wendy Long; a failed challenger for the New York Senate seat held by Democrat Kristen Gillibrand.
The charges have Republicans crying foul (the creepy former candidate for NY governor Carl Palladino suggested the charges against D'Souza amounted to a "liberal witch hunt") but the law is clear on individual contributions to Senate campaigns and D'Souza broke it.
In a statement released by the FBI, the US Attorney for Manhattan Preet Bharara said, "...this office and the FBI take a zero tolerance approach to corruption of the electoral process."
Honestly though, did D'Souza really think there would be no consequences for spending six years trashing the president? We'll see what the former Ronald Reagan disciple has to say about big government now.
For a guy who's made a career out of stoking the fires of the evangelical Christian conservative mindset through a relentless assault on the moral failings of others, (and a freakish, borderline cult-like obsession with smearing President Obama) Dinesh D'Souza has spent much of the past 16 months discovering what it's like to be publicly outed for having the same human frailties as everyone else.
As Peter S. Canellos revealed in a Boston Globe article back in 2007, D'Souza adopted his petty, bully mentality as a young writer for the Dartmouth Review when he penned pieces and commentaries that attacked affirmative action, mocked African-American speech, outed members of the Dartmouth Gay Student Alliance and made anti-Semitic comments about a Jewish faculty member among other things.
So conservatives can whine about D'Souza being targeted for political reasons all they want; he's been a smug, insulting, condescending bigot for years - and his arrogance caught up with him when his hatred for Democratic Senator Gillibrand got the better of him and he thought he'd be clever and dump $20,000 into a Republican challenger's coffers (and lie to the Republican challenger about where the cash came from) and no one would be the wiser.
Maybe it just didn't occur to Dinesh that talking and writing smack about the sitting president put him under the spotlight until he was actually caught in the spotlight. Hindsight is 20-20 and like The Who, no doubt Dinesh can now see for miles and miles.
While he entered a not-guilty plea last Friday, news reports suggest both Wendy Long and the two people who channeled D'Souza's illegal $20,000 campaign contribution to her, will all be testifying against him in court.
D'Souza's high-priced defense attorney Benjamin Brafman will probably keep his client from doing jail time, but the damage to his already tattered reputation will probably keep him from being a serious threat to Hillary Clinton's candidacy; unless the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson take pity on him and bankroll another Benghazi book or something.
Truth is it's getting harder to take him seriously.
Lest we forget it was only back in October, 2012 that D'Souza was outed for adultery (at a Christian Values summit in South Carolina no less) after he was discovered shacked up in the hotel with married blogger Denise Joseph; Conservative values indeed.
Karma's a bitch; maybe Dinesh could write a book about that.
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