Conservative Pundit D’Souza, Convicted for Giving Money to Friends For Illegal Motives, To Undergo Court-Ordered “Therapeutic Counseling”

It’s not enough to do the court-ordered time for the crime of
giving money to your friends for motives the state has decided are
felony crimes when that motive is to support a political
candidate–this is the land of the free where political
participation is near-sacred, and one can participate in the
electoral process only with a narrow set of state-approved methods,
and don’t you forget it, and don’t you disagree with it either.

The punishment imposed in the case of conservative pundit and
anti-Obama filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza show you must also agree
that it is good you were convicted, apparently.

From Reuters:

D’Souza, 53, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman
in Manhattan to live in a center, which would allow him to leave
during non-residential hours for employment, for the first eight
months of a five-year probationary period.

Berman also ordered D’Souza to perform one day of community
service a week during probation, undergo weekly therapy and pay a
$30,000 fine.

D’Souza, a frequent critic of U.S. President Barack
Obama, admitted in May to illegally reimbursing two “straw
donors” who donated $10,000 each to the unsuccessful 2012 U.S.
Senate campaign in New York of Wendy Long, a Republican he had
known since attending Dartmouth College in the early 1980s….

Prosecutors had sought a 10-to 16-month prison sentence,
rejecting defense arguments that D’Souza was “ashamed and contrite”
about his crime and deserved probation with community service.

They cited statements D’Souza made in media interviews after his
guilty plea, where he discussed being “selectively” targeted for
prosecution….

“I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it,” Berman said before
announcing the sentence. “And it is still hard for me to discern
any personal acceptance of responsibility in this case.”

Daily Beast refers to the
legally imposed therapy in quotes from the court as
“therapeutic counseling.” Forced therapy for enemies of the regime:
it’s not just for our sinister enemies abroad anymore in this
better, more peaceful post-Cold War world.

Have you ever maxed out on your legal contributions to a
political candidate? Have you ever given or loaned money to a
friend? Better make sure that friend hasn’t also given money to
that candidate, or you could be opening yourself to federal
investigations into your motives in the giving or knowledge of
their giving.

This may require a fairly officious level of investigation into
your life and papers, but hey, you might have broken the law and
this is a nation of laws, lots and lots of laws that you might have
broken. And if you broke them, you better understand that you broke
them and accept responsibility. It’s the American way.

I blogged a few months back about how
D’Souza’s admission of “guilt” didn’t amend my belief that the
charges were a miscarriage of true justice.