D'Souza's Downfall: Religious Right Favorite Sentenced For Campaign Donation Violations
Rob Boston printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Wed Sep 24, 2014 at 10:34:56 AM EST

Yesterday conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza was sentenced to five years of probation and a term of community service for violating federal campaign laws. He must also pay a fine of $30,000.

For many years, D'Souza was a garden-variety conservative who preached the standard libertarian line of small government and low taxes. At some point, he decided to climb aboard the Religious Right gravy train. In 2007 he penned a book titled What's So Great About Christianity. He spoke at the Values Voter Summit in 2012 and has appeared at other Religious Right gatherings - often collecting hefty speaking fees.

Even while excoriating "the left" for its lack of values, D'Souza was busy constructing an ethics void of his own. In the lead-up to the 2012 elections, he was so determined to help Wendy Long, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate and a friend of his, that he decided to violate federal law.

D'Souza convinced two associates to make donations of $10,000 (the maximum for an individual) to Long's campaign. He then reimbursed them. This is completely illegal, and D'Souza, who has worked in the political sphere for decades, surely knew that.

Caught red-handed, D'Souza's first defense was to assert that the prosecution was really a political vendetta from President Barack Obama, a frequent target for D'Souza's attacks. But that fell flat when the federal judge overseeing his case quickly noted that several Democrats had been charged with the identical offense at the same time.

So D'Souza basically threw himself on the mercy of the court. He admitted what he did was wrong and claimed to be very contrite - at least that's what he said in court. D'Souza sounded less than contrite outside of court, where he continued telling fellow right-wingers that the whole thing was an Obama frame-up.

D'Souza could have faced more than a year in prison. Instead, he will spend eight months in a kind of halfway house and do community service once a week. All in all, it's a light sentence considering that he knowingly violated the law.

That's hypocrisy count one.

Here's count two: In 2012, D'Souza left his wife for a much younger woman. While still legally married, he arrived at a Religious Right conference in September at a Baptist church in South Carolina with his new paramour, Denise Odie Joseph II, in tow. He introduced her to several people as his fiancée. (Joseph was married as well.)

World magazine, hardly a font of mad-dog liberalism, picks up the story from there: "Although D'Souza has been married for 20 years to his wife, Dixie, in South Carolina he was with a young woman, Denise Odie Joseph II, and introduced her to at least three people as his fiancée. Finally, near 11 p.m., event organizer Tony Beam escorted D'Souza and Joseph to the nearby Comfort Suites. Beam noted that they checked in together and were apparently sharing a room for the night in the sold-out hotel. The next morning, around 6 a.m., Beam arrived back at the hotel and called up to D'Souza's room. `We'll be down in 10 minutes,' D'Souza told Beam. D'Souza and Joseph came down together, and Beam took them to the airport. The next day another conference organizer, Alex McFarland, distressed by D'Souza's behavior, confronted him in a telephone conversation. D'Souza admitted he shared a room with his fiancée but said `nothing happened.'"

Such hubris! But the fallout came quickly. D'Souza had been serving as president of the King's College, an evangelical institution in New York City. The school fired him - well, accepted his resignation.

But in D'Souza's world, nothing is ever his fault. Yes, he knew it was illegal to launder those campaign donations, but Obama is still to blame. And as for his girlfriend and the whole adultery thing, that's just some hyper-sensitive evangelicals getting all bent out of shape.

He even blamed his wife for leaving him. Not surprisingly, her version of events is a little different. She wrote a rather scathing letter to the court, which you can read here. Spoiler: D'Souza doesn't come off looking good. Dixie accuses him of forging her signature on a document and of physical assault.

All of this comes from a man who built a career out of smugly judging others and insisting that his religion - D'Souza was raised Roman Catholic but at some point converted to evangelical Protestantism and declared himself "born again" - is superior to any other worldview. (Check out this 2006 column in which he argues that atheism is responsible for mass murder.) His own arrogance led to his fall.

I don't know what kind of community service D'Souza will be doing, but I hope it's something like picking up trash along the highway or cutting back weeds in a public park. My fear is that some misguided official will let this guy work with troubled young people. That would be a disaster. Kids in crisis need a real role model with a moral center. D'Souza, an ethically challenged hypocrite, hardly fits the bill.

 

 




Display:
D'Souza left all the paper trails he could to show that he had committed the offense. D'Souza's former wife, Dixie, also didn't come to his side. Instead she asked for Dinesh to be given the maximum sentence. I'm not certain that Dinesh and Denise are still an item at this point, but certainly he gave that impression at the SC conference.

by khughes1963 on Wed Sep 24, 2014 at 11:45:32 PM EST


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