A better person might have gone with “maybe I shouldn’t have bribed my kids’ way into a school they didn’t deserve to attend,” but okay.

Enlightenment is a process. This is a first step towards Ultimate Truth.

I wonder what her first clue was that going to trial wasn’t smart. Was it the fact that the feds have her on tape seemingly conspiring with the ringleader of the bribery scam to lie about what her $500,000 payment was for?

“While a few friends have stuck by her side, many others have cut her off,” the source claims. “She still feels it’s a huge misunderstanding, but seeing others be sentenced has scared her.”

“She is watching the reduced sentences of those who have taken plea deals, and wondering each day if she’s made the wrong decision,” the source adds of Loughlin, who, along with Giannulli, reportedly rejected an initial plea deal…

“She is trying to live a normal everyday life and to take this time to stay strong but it isn’t easy. Lori doesn’t have the support she once had. She is feeling a ‘fall from grace’ having had a persona as a wholesome mom and now being seen as a pariah,” the source says. “People keep giving Lori a hard time for being out and about and looking carefree, but she realizes that she might end up in prison and this might just be her last months of freedom for some time.”

A few months ago, she and her husband were reportedly planning to argue in court that they thought their alleged bribes were actually “donations.” Bear in mind, they paid $100,000 in two separate installments to a particular person in the USC athletics department as part of the “our daughters are rowers” charade, each within days of their children being granted provisional admission to the school.

Did they think “donations” to universities are normally paid to individual personnel, coincidentally timed to admissions?

Loughlin’s gradual coming to grips with the magnitude of her offense has been a tragicomic tabloid tale for months, with various rationales floated by sources for rejecting the plea bargain. At one point she was supposedly going to claim she was entrapped. At another point she allegedly wanted to go to trial to clear her name and regain the good reputation that’s been momentarily lost within her social circle. At other times it’s seemed as if she was playing chicken with the feds, signaling that she’ll drag them through an expensive court battle if they don’t come back with a sweeter plea deal involving no jail time instead of the two years they were asking.

I think the simplest explanation is probably the correct one, though: She just hasn’t been able to get her head around the idea that she’s going to be punished for this. This is what rich people do. They use their money to benefit their children. They pay off institutions on their children’s behalf and those institutions, and the government, look the other way because wealth is supposed to bring certain privileges. She woke up one morning in the Twilight Zone, not only a national laughingstock but face to face with the unimaginable reality that she’s going to do time and there’s nothing she can say or do to move the feds off of that position. They demanded two years, she instinctively said no way, and she’s been waiting in vain for them to cave and offer community service or whatever. And now here we are.

In lieu of an exit question, this clip has nothing whatsoever to do with Loughlin or the college admissions scandal but it would feel wrong to end the bloggy week with anything else. The Age of Aquarius, buddy. It’s almost here. And Trump is the only thing standing in the way.