DON'T JAIL D'SOUZA -- IT'LL ONLY HELP HIS CAREER

It's just a throwaway at the end of a lengthy New Republic interview of Dinesh D'Souza by Sam Tanenhaus, but TNR shrewdly turns that brief answer into a headline:

ST: So what happens if they send you away? What are you going to do?

DD: I'm just gonna have to go to jail and write something about it.

The headline is: "Dinesh D'Souza Is Planning His Prison Memoir" -- and, well, of course he is. The wingnut audience loves defiant martyrs claiming victimization at the hands of jackbooted liberals. He could spend a couple of months in the softest of county-club prisons and still turn out a memoir that makes The Gulag Archipelago seem like Jailhouse Rock. Hell, he'll probably write a whiny, self-pitying, angry memoir of suffering if he's sentenced to community service, just for having to go to trial. And the rubes will lap it up.

To tell you the truth, I have problems with the fact that D'Souza's facing jail time -- far worse campaign-finance practices than his are perfectly legal, and far more appalling wrongdoers (Angelo Mozilo, George Zimmerman, Ray Rice) are walking around free. Don't get me wrong -- I have no sympathy for the guy. I just don't want to turn him into a guy whose imprisonment gives him, within his demimonde, some sort of mystique.

Then again, no matter what happens to him, apparently he's always going to land on his feet. He seems like an uncharismatic and not particularly clever guy, but as he pointed out in another recent interview, with National Journal, you can't get rid of him:

"My main goal through this is to annoy the Left, because you have all these guys railing on my Twitter," he says, grinning impishly. "They're just seething with envy. They're like, 'Shit!' "

"We thought we'd buried him!" Schooley says, mimicking a seething liberal.

"Yeah, exactly," D'Souza says. "You should just see the number of times there are articles on 'Dinesh's career is over.' My career is apparently over every two years."

Such articles first began appearing with regularity around 2007, after D'Souza published a book heretical to people across the political spectrum, arguing that responsibility for the September 11 terrorist attacks lies with the "cultural Left." Three years later, the thesis articulated in The Roots of Obama's Rage -- that the president was a rabid "anticolonialist" acting out the wishes of his dead Kenyan father -- earned D'Souza even more scorn. Then, in 2012, came the mistress flap, which unsurprisingly damaged his credibility as an ambassador of the Christian Right.

And yet D'Souza's crap still sells, and his "documentaries" still draw audience, because, as this quote makes clear, he has a huge ego to complement his unmitigated gall. He has will. Please, don't feed that. Don't hand him that much new material.