Dinesh D’Souza is popular with the Official Right these days, but that says more about the Official Right than D’Souza. There will be plenty of columns tomorrow from the usual suspects about the unfairness of prosecuting D’Souza.

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was sentenced on Tuesday to spend eight months in a community confinement center during five years of probation after pleading guilty to a campaign finance law violation.

The defendant, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan. He was also given a $30,000 fine and ordered to do one day of community service a week during his probation.

D’Souza, 53, 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.

“It was a crazy idea, it was a bad idea,” D’Souza told Berman before being sentenced. “I regret breaking the law.”

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.

In fairness, it is grossly unjust what’s going on here. The people in charge are rampaging though the law with impunity. This guy gets sent to the can for what was a minor offense. If he was just some guy, of course, no one would care. He’s buddies with the big shots of Conservative Inc so they will be making a big deal of it. The safe bet is they stage a cry in for the guy or start crying “racism!”

The trouble wit this pity party is this. D’Souza has always been a backstabbing fink and an opportunist. When conservatism was more nationalist, he was a Reagan firebrand. When the neocons took over, he was right there with them. Now that the Right is all worked up over Obama, he’s going to be the most unhinged Obama hater and for only $49.95 you can get his book and latest DVD. In the end, it is always about moving product for him.

The real sin is that D’Souza stabbed in the back one of the great conservative polemicists of his generation. Back in the 1990’s, he took money to do a hit piece on Sam Francis for the neocons that ultimately got the man fired. Francis was his own worst enemy, but you don’t take a contract from the enemy to whack a member of your own family and remain in the family. For that, D’Douza can never be forgiven.