Dinesh D'Souza's '2016: Obama's America'

Unhappy, perhaps, that Michael Moore and his lefty confederates have monopolized the documentary film business in recent years, and certainly anxious to give fresh legs to his 2010 book, The Roots of Obama's Rage, the conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza has co-produced, written, directed and starred in 2016: Obama's America, now playing to wide audiences across Tea Partyland.

The burden of the film? Be very, very afraid. Barack Obama is halfway to his goal of destroying America as we know it, and if he wins a second term he will likely finish the job.

D'Souza begins disarmingly, noting parallels between Obama's experience and his own that, he says, initially pricked his interest. Both he and Obama were born the same year (1961), graduated from an Ivy League school the same year (1983) and married the same year (1985).

D'Souza doesn't buy into birther theories, but he takes an indirect route to the same conclusion: Obama isn't really an American. D'Souza describes his own fascination with America while growing up in Mumbai, and his wonder and delight in discovering in it a tolerant, multiracial society ready to embrace a hard-working young Indian migrant like himself.

Hawaii, the president's birthplace, was technically American soil, but of course native Hawaiians, the vast bulk of the population, were the descendants of a conquered people, and anti-colonialism, especially in left-wing circles, was a bitter legacy. Then, too, Obama would spend several of his formative years in Indonesia, a Muslim nation with even more recent colonial memories.

Proof positive

But above all, Obama would be shaped by the influence of his father, Barack Obama Sr., a left-wing Kenyan academic whose country had just undergone a bloody and traumatizing struggle for independence.

Of course, Barack Sr. left the family when Obama was all of two, and Barack saw him only once again, at age ten. A more plausible influence was Barack's anti-Communist stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. But D'Souza suggests (without any evidence) that Obama's mother deflected it.

Nor is any mention made of the key figure in Obama's upbringing: his grandmother. Instead we are left with speculation about the long shadow of an absent father.

D'Souza makes much of the fact that Obama entitled one of his autobiographies Dreams from My Father. The telling use of a preposition— from instead of of— is for D'Souza proof positive that Obama was from the first determined to fulfill his father's anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist political agenda, and on the widest possible stage: America itself.

Ask any ad agency

To buttress this assertion, the film repeatedly intercuts its narrative with the image of "Obama" kneeling at his father's grandiose but neglected tomb in Kenya. Whether the tomb is Obama Sr.'s or not I cannot say, but obviously the kneeling figure we see, shown only from behind, is a re-enactor.

As any ad agency will tell you, the essence of persuasion is association and repetition. The piously mourning "Obama," shown over and over again as if frozen psychologically in time, does duty in place of biographical data or reasoned argument.

Of course, the Obama depicted by D'Souza would depend on surrogates, especially in the radical hotbed of Chicago. There is William Ayers, the unrepentant Chicago Weatherman, and Franklin Marshall Davis, an obscure figure whose Communist party card is flashed prominently on the screen. D'Souza gives us Davis's full name several times, as if to remind us that all people who use three names are overt or covert Communists— e.g., Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Barack Hussein Obama.

Menacing montage

But of course the great stand-in for Barack Sr. is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, of "God damn America!" fame. We are shown the Reverend Wright in full cry against a menacing montage. Needless to say, Obama's public break with Wright during the 2008 campaign goes unmentioned.

Of Obama's actual pre-presidential career we hear virtually nothing. He is presented as a blank slate on which Americans were encouraged to do their own Etch-a-Sketch, while Obama's own agenda was hidden behind contentless generalities like "hope" and "change." A public hungry for both in the midst of war and economic crisis was quick to vest its confidence in a man almost no one knew.

The problem with D'Souza's argument— its ludicrous pop psychology aside— is that, four years into the Obama administration, it is hard to see how America is more socialistic (or less imperialistic).

Exhibit A would be the Affordable Health Care Act, but even the Roberts Court gave it at least a qualified pass. And if a bill that extends a private market for 30 million new customers is socialistic, it would be hard to imagine what capitalism actually looks like.

This is a socialist?

It's also difficult to see how a government that guarantees private equity on a vast scale and oversees the growth of 4.6 million private sector jobs while the state and federal workforce shrinks is raising the Red flag. Wall Street in fact could hardly have asked for a better, more generous or more tolerant friend than Obama, who has bailed out bankrupt financial institutions and industries, kept interest rates at historic lows, and given a free pass to the malefactors who gave Americans the second deepest depression in the past century.

Of course, all of this could be a ruse to lull us into a false sense of security while Obama plots capitalism's demise in a second term. But the evidence must thus far be characterized as exceedingly scanty.

As for Obama's alleged anti-colonialism, the chief evidence—other than the fact that he seems more popular abroad than his predecessor— is that he returned a bust of Winston Churchill to Britain. D'Souza is so taken with this act that he returns to it for emphasis.

Returning Churchill's bust

Churchill, of course, was the staunch defender of the British Empire as well as of the freedoms we all love and cherish, so naturally Obama would want to expunge any hint of him from the Oval Office. It looks pretty bad for Barack, until we learn— not from D'Souza, however— that the bust was on loan, and its return had already been scheduled during the Bush administration.

Ah, yes, but Obama is ready to dump Israel to the Arab wolves, and the whole Arab Spring— beginning with our betrayal of a faithful ally, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt— is part and parcel of a plan to create a United States of Islam (the term is D'Souza's, as is the fanciful map he shows us, outlined in barbed wire) that will stretch from Pakistan to Morocco and bring us to our knees with a billion new terrorists. This is why we quit Iraq, coddle Iran and refuse to help Syrian freedom fighters.

Never mind, again, that under Obama we teamed up with Israel to wage cyberwar against Iran's nuclear program; that Obama withdrew fighting forces from Iraq on the exact timetable negotiated by the Bush administration; and that the Syrian freedom fighters include Al Qaeda units. Let's not mention the Libyan intervention and the continuing Afghan war, either.

Nut constituency

I trust you get my point. 2016 is a slick exercise in distortion and fabrication, of cynicism designed to exploit paranoia. At times it verges on hilarity, except that its box office numbers aren't funny at all.

There is a nut constituency out there that stood ready to demonize Obama as the Marxist chief of a new Cominterm from Day One. What else could a black Democratic president be?

The irony is that there is a genuine and substantial case to be made against Obama from a left perspective. Michael Moore would have been ideal to make it. But Moore is on the barricades for Barack, and Noam Chomsky doesn't know how to operate a camera.

Just about everyone I know is terrified of a Romney presidency. They're too frightened to get even a good belly laugh from 2016.♦


To read a related comment by Dan Rottenberg, click here.