D'ough? D'oh!

I admit it; I have cordially disliked Dinesh D'Souza since his nasty screed, The Enemy at Home, in which he argued that the American Left was to blame for 9/11, because, you see, the jihadist critique of the decadence we have fostered was correct. (No, really; that's what he argued.) And his contention that

the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States….

****

Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

So, when D'Souza became the President of a Christian College near my office, I, in the words of Gonzalo in The Tempest, inly wept, but held my peace. Which was just as well, because it didn't take; he resigned "two days after World Magazine, a Christian-oriented publication, reported that he had checked into a Comfort Suites in South Carolina in September with a woman he introduced as his fiancée, despite the fact that he was already married."

Again, I held my peace. Oh, I was tempted, I admit to write a snarky piece about his rather high-handed response (“I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced,” he said, in one of the only funny lines I have ever heard attributed to him). But, no. I held back.

However, this is worthy of a little analysis:

Dinesh D’Souza, a best-selling conservative author and filmmaker, was indicted on Thursday on charges that he used straw donors to illegally donate to a 2012 Senate campaign.

Mr. D’Souza is an outspoken political commentator who directed “2016: Obama’s America,” a scathing anti-Obama documentary released in the final months of the president’s re-election campaign.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said that Mr. D’Souza encouraged others to give $20,000 to a Senate candidate and reimbursed them for the donations. Election law prohibits such arrangements and caps donations at $5,000 per donor to any one candidate.The Senate candidate was not identified in the indictment. Mr. D’Souza donated to only one federal candidate in 2012, giving $5,000 to Wendy Long, a New York Republican who lost her challenge to Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, a Democrat.

“Mr. D’Souza did not act with any corrupt or criminal intent whatsoever,” his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, said in a statement. “He and the candidate have been friends since their college days, and at most, this was an act of misguided friendship by D’Souza.”

Prosecutors also charged Mr. D’Souza with causing the unidentified candidate’s campaign to unwittingly file false campaign documents. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan.

That's the defense? That he didn't know that it was wrong to, after making the maximum individual contribution to his old friend, fund others' donations? In plain English, his own lawyer is saying that D'Souza "misguidedly" did an end-run around the statute by laundering donations beyond the maximum through other people?

Um, that's perilously close to an admission of guilt.

Meanwhile, Matt Drudge (remember him?) is claiming that this and the indictment of former Governor Bob McDonnell is Obama persecuting his critics.

Yeah. And if Brafman (Or, for that matter, the McDonnells) hadn't essentially conceded the truth of the facts underpinning the indictments, while challenging their interpretation, you could almost, by squinting, and using a prism, see it.

I have to admit it, I find the notion that Obama has been biding his time before the Great Purge of Dissent vaguely hilarious. I think Drudge and his ilk have him confused with someone else:



(At 1:20)