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 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.
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.