Dinesh D'Souza Indicted

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You might remember this little rightwing prick, Dinesh D'Souza, from his appearance on The Daily Show or Real Time with Bill Maher.  Or perhaps for his slanderous documentary 2016: Obama's America.  Or you might remember D'Souza as the president of the uber-Christian King's College who had to resign in disgrace when he got caught dicking a woman other than his then wife while on an out-of-towner to attend a rightwing conference Truth for a New Generation.  He claimed that they were already engaged and just waiting for his divorce to come through so they could be married.  Then, when the heat got too much, Dinesh simply dumped her.

Now the little jerk is in hot water again.  He's been indicted for violating the federal campaign finance laws by making illegal contributions to a United States Senate campaign in the names of others and causing false statements to be made to the Federal Election Commission in connection with those contributions.

According to The New York Times, "Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said that 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 Hollywood Reporter pointed out that "Federal authorities accuse D'Souza of donating more than is legal to the campaign of Wendy Long, who ran in 2012 for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton but lost to now-Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Long, though, is not mentioned in an indictment obtained by THR."

The indictment says that "D'Souza donated $20,000 to Long's campaign by aggregating the money from various people and falsely reporting the source of the funds."

David Corn of   Mother Jones also reminds us of what an odious little asshole D'Souza has been for pretty much his entire adult life.

D'Souza's extremism traces back to his college days, when he was an editor of the Dartmouth Review, the leading conservative college publication of the early 1980s. (Wendy Long was a Dartmouth student and served as a trustee of the Review in the 1990s.) In that post, D'Souza became a hero to young conservatives across the nation (and the right-wing foundations looking to fund them). While he helmed the Review, it published a "lighthearted interview with a former Klan leader"—accompanied by a staged photo of a black person hanging from a tree—and an assault on affirmative action titled, "Dis Sho Ain't No Jive, Bro," which was written in Ebonics. ("Now we be comin' to Dartmut and be up over our 'fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin' Phi Beta Kappa.") The "Jive" article caused Jack Kemp, a conservative icon mindful of the right's problems with minority outreach, to resign from the Review's advisory board. Decades later, it's clear that D'Souza chose the path of the foul at an early point. 

...he bragged about the Review having made use of a list of Dartmouth alumni it had somehow procured—without the university's approval—for a mailing. (The university maintained the Review had misappropriated the list and committed a copyright violation.) He and his surrounding acolytes also gloated over an infamous Review article that had outed members of Dartmouth's Gay Student Association and published excerpts of letters written by the group's members. (As a result of this article, some members of the group had their sexual orientation disclosed to friends and family members.)

Nine years later, when D'Souza was being hailed upon the publication of his book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus—the Washington Post called him "palpably smart," "sober-minded," and a "gentleman"—I wrote a short piece in The Nation and recalled that I had once witnessed him boasting about improperly purloining documents for the gay-naming article.
D'Souza cried foul, claiming that the Review had not used any underhanded means to gain access to information about the members of the Gay Student Association.

...Much of what D'Souza did in college as a rising conservative star foreshadowed the career of ideological nastiness to come. But relishing the outing of gay students (and at that luncheon there was much relishing) and engaging in dirty tricks to obtain those names—well, that speaks not to ideology, but character. And it is but one reason, even if now dusty, why D'Souza warrants little sympathy for being accused of once again breaking the rules to serve his ideological aims.