It’s interesting to see how Ann Althouse and her commenters responded to the news that Dinesh d’Souza has been indicted in federal court for making illegal campaign donations. Ms. Althouse acknowledges that a crime has been committed and that “meaning well” is not exactly a defense, but she suggests that d’Souza’s crime was insignificant and that he probably was only indicted because he made a movie critical of the president. Also, campaign finance laws are too complicated so no one wants to run for office. The comments follow in the same vein, with minimization of the crime, charges of hypocrisy, and plenty of conspiratorial speculating.
I wonder how long we would have to wait for these people to offer the same defenses to someone who sold a small amount of crack.
Yeah, just like how Obama is taking out contenders for the GOP mantle in Christie and McDonnell! It’s all politically motivated.
Or, you know, all of the conservative movement is full of projection, comprising self-loathing LGBT, voter fraudsters, criminals, and scoundrels.
Yup, Obama is a shrewd schemer who’s able to take out leading contenders at will, while simultaneously being too inept to run the country. Complete contradiction, but when has that ever stopped them?
Hasn’t that been done and doesn’t said seller still sit in the US House of Representatives?
IOW it’s still a matter of IOKIYAR
Well, I’ll forego any sympathy for people who sell a small amount of crack, if, instead of opening-up an investigation of a woman’s miscarriage for signs an abortion, they offer their condolences.
@$$HOLES!!!
As far as D’Loser, as it was said earlier, it’s always OKIYAR.
Sorry, but I’m not buying it. The prospect of the NSA/FBI becoming a tool of government to destroy any opposition grows stronger by the day. You must feel the electoral map guarantees there will never be a Republican president, because all those 3 letter agencies can turn on you on a dime.
The fact that a “crime” may have been committed is in fact almost meaningless. The federal law code is so huge, so expansive, so complicated that it is almost certain everybody can be found to have committed a crime if they feel like looking hard enough. And they can read your every email and listen to your every phone call.
One need not like D’souza or agree with anything he says to be concerned. Indeed, the video in question, implying Obama actually feels some remorse for past US imperialism (If only that were true!!) is ludicrous. Obama is every bit the aggressive nationalist Bush was. Perhaps Jimmy Carter was the last non-jingoist president we’ve had, and they destroyed his reputation.
D’Souza is in a death spiral of self-destructive behavior. This should come as a surprise to exactly no one. The rest is a nice exemplar of paranoid libertarianism.
Yes, Obama is just as bad as Bush, because we all know Bush got us out of Iraq. We all know Bush sat down in multilateral talks with Iran. We all know that he embraced multilateral global institutions on the Libya and Syria questions.
I realize that from Venus, Chicago and Crawford seem close together, but they really aren’t.
Yes, keep your eyes closed tight. Nothing to see here.
Obama tried everything he could to negotiate a long lasting SOFA and stay permanently in Iraq and they told him no. X 1000. He sends flying robots all over the globe to zap random wedding parties. He launched an unprovoked war on Libya. He was one step away from a war on Syria and only blinked because Russia and China were firm, his British sidekicks abandoned him, public opinion at home was fiercely opposed and the world in general had just had enough. But he made clear where his sentiments lay.
I know under a microscope, two cells can seem far apart, but they really aren’t.
Yes, Obama wakes up every morning, wondering if there is a wedding somewhere he can attack. And Britain, France and Italy dragged us into Libya. He blinked on Syria, because of public opinion in the US and Britain. In other words, he did not repeat the mistake that Bush made in 2003.
Do you really think Libya and a Libyan-style intervention in Syria are the same thing as Iraq?
Every president is constrained by the military/security complex to some degree. To me, the most interesting revelation in Gates’ book is that Obama has been trying to push back against the military’s desire to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maybe he’s not strong enough to stand up against them, but “the same as Bush”?
I personally am getting really tired of Barack Obama reading all my emails. And remember when he appointed two more pro-life justices to the Supreme Court and they overturned Roe v. Wade? Assholes.
What really got me was when he was talking about striking Syria over chemical weapons, and when Syria agreed to give up their chemical weapons, he backed off the strikes in order to give Putin a boost, so that Putin would take in Snowden and get all the information Snowden had to give it back to the NSA.
Eleven dimensional imperialism…
As if to prove my point, we have this:
U.S. Investigating Dennis Rodman for Busting Sanctions
Now whether you like Denis Rodman or not is entirely irrelevant. How evil the North Korean government is is also irrelevant. The point is the US government got annoyed at someone making a public visit to North Korea and decided to find a way to hang him for it. Luckily for them, they have so many laws that they can always find a way to get you and make it all seem nice and legal like.
Re: Syria and chemical weapons and Obama’s handling of it. We were back in August/September treated to a train of US officials saying they had near irrefutable proof the Syrian government was behind the Ghouta chemical weapons attack. In the subsequent months we saw absolutely none of those proofs.
If you take the story of Syria surrendering its chemical arsenal at face value, rather than Putin throwing Obama a face saving lifeline, then you are still left with the fact that Obama was on the verge of ordering an assault on a third world country in no position to defend itself. Somehow, in the minds of the “antiwar” left, that does NOT constitute imperialism, because in the end he didn’t attack Syria. He only threatened to.
Comparing that to Bush in 2003 is fruitless. At the time Bush had his post 9/11, pre Iraq war halo still around his head and so had a lot more latitude to be an idiot. Obama in the summer of 2013 had much less.
Thanks for the link. Apparently when Dennis Rodman gets photographed handing illegal luxury goods to Kim Jong Un, the only reason Treasury gets interested is that Rodman represents freedom. I’m pretty sure Kim allowed that photo to be released, as he wished to sabotage Rodman’s visit, being the agent of Obama that he is.
Also, Obama is a puppet of Putin, too!!!2!!!!!
Wheels within wheels, my friend. Buy gold.
The thread is old buy now so I should probably let it go…but I can’t.
Yes, treasury is after Rodman because he represents a peaceful alternative to constant warmongering. It just so happens that they have enough laws that they will always find find one that you broke, if they want to.
I made no claim of anyone being anyone’s puppet, so not sure what you are referring to, but I’m sure its very clever whatever it is.
Lastly, I hope someday you take a look at the book “Three Felonies a Day” by Harvey Silvergate.
sorry, this was reply to a different comment, error
Read the comments on his FB page. Dude is a fucking martyr for the swamp dwellers. I say put him in a FEMA camp.
I’ve done some campaign finance work, and this does not look accidental in any way.
The usual unwitting violation is the person who writes a couple of checks, not realizing that the total takes him over the limit. It happens all the time, and of course the campaign usually solves the problem by reimbursing the extra amount.
Straw donor violations, though, pretty much define intent to violate the law. He had to recruit the donors, get them to write the checks, and then reimburse them. (Of course, the payment from him could have come before the contributions, but it’s the same either way.) It’s very hard to do that without “any corrupt or criminal intent,” as his lawyers claim and, of course, there’s no good explanation for why you would if you thought it was okay to donate $20,000 yourself.
(I suppose his lawyers could argue that he did it only to give the impression that Ms. Long had more high-level donors, but that’s still against the law, and not particularly ethical, either.)
Illegal and not so uncommon. D’Souza was just too inept or lazy to bother covering his tracks well enough that it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb.
Yeah, as intentional violations go, it’s probably the most common, and it doesn’t take an enormous effort to cover your tracks if you really want to do so.
It’s probably less common than donating too much money in your own name, but that one generally gets self-corrected by the campaigns before there’s any chance for enforcement.
Well, at least he’ll still be able to get a job for the stage production of “IOKIYAR: The Musical.”
The thing is there’s no possible reason for d’Souza to break this law unknowingly. He broke it deliberately. He isn’t claiming the law is unjust or against his conscience; he’s just saying he felt like breaking it for a friend’s benefit.
Apparently that’s good enough for Althouse and her flying monkeys.
The thing is there’s no possible reason for d’Souza to break this law unknowingly. He broke it deliberately. He isn’t claiming the law is unjust or against his conscience; he’s just saying he felt like breaking it for a friend’s benefit.
Apparently that’s good enough for Althouse and her flying monkeys.