It's getting to the point where the best thing that could ever happen to a conservative pundit is to be indicted for something. Hello, second-tier conservative pundit who nobody ever gave two poops about, are you still a nobody? "Oh heavens no, I have done an explicitly illegal thing and have gotten caught doing it. This means that The Man is terribly afraid of me and will do anything to keep me from broadcasting my stern message of unlikely conspiracy and pompous self-regard to the masses."
And so we get cases like Dinesh D'Souza, who pled guilty to breaking campaign finance laws freaking yesterday and who already has been booked on the Fox News as poster child for how conservative pundits can't break whatever laws they want these days without The Man getting all legal at them.
“[T]he Obama administration gets to call one of its top critics a convicted felon,” [Megyn Kelly] began the segment. “Is this what they wanted all along?”
We have to pause here to interject that I am quite certain that the Obama administration does not and has never given two sh-ts about Dinesh D'Souza. We here on Daily Kos barely can be roused to give two sh-ts about Dinesh D'Souza, even when he gets indicted for felonies or pleads guilty to the same, and we have an entire team (well, me) dedicated to giving two sh-ts about conservatives who say or do or promote obviously crazy things. This is because Dinesh D'Souza, despite fancying himself a maker of films these days, is so fringe and silly and unlistened-to that the effort it would take to give various numbers of sh-ts about him is better spent doing almost
anything else. Dinesh D'Souza and his various troubles are, as we say here, a Slow News Day story.
To his credit, D'Sousa realizes he has not been sentenced yet and, for the first time in forever, tries to be veeeeery careful in what he says so as to not piss the judge off over his morning cornflakes. He is mostly-but-not-entirely successful—why, oh why, did the judge deny my defense of But Other People Do It Too—but this means it is mostly left to Kelly to polish his martyrdom credentials, and polish she does. She polishes so hard and so long that the building's fire alarms nearly go off.
“Your defense in this case was not I didn’t do it,” Kelly said. “It was, I didn’t do it with intent, I didn’t do it with the right requisite of mind, and it’s selective prosecution of the government who doesn’t go after anybody for this kind of crime except coincidentally one of the president’s biggest critics.”
And so on and so forth. D'Souza should be proud. He may forever be a convicted felon, but at least he gave the Fox News talking heads a few more minutes of anti-Obama conspiracy theories to froth over. That's gotta be worth something, right?