Film Review: ‘2016: Obama’s America’ is a Cesspool of Partisan Hackery

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

CHICAGO – What are you afraid of, right now? Is it the shaky economy, the red/blue political divide or maybe Dunkin Donuts ran out of Oreo smoothies? You know what’s easy about justifying those fears? Blaming President Obama. “2016: Obama’s America,” written and directed by conservative propagandist Dinesh D’Souza, wants to blame Obama for the sun going down.

Rating: 0.0/5.0

Conservative propagandists love to use the weapon of “how Obama thinks” as their main critiques of the man, which is as unfair as tying a sprinter to the starting blocks before a race. D’Souza, who has written books with titles such as “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” and has made a career gathering his pieces of silver working at “conservative think tanks” (an oxymoron or epic proportions), also has blamed the “cultural left” for 9/11. The whole film is merely a speculative circus parade of how parts of Obama’s life equals “this is the way he thinks,” even though they is no evidence of D’Souza’s amazing mind reading in the life or policies of the president. Basically, this is red meat for Obama haters, and uses the same boring talking points from 2008 (Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, anybody? Anybody?).

Dinesh D’Souza is an immigrant from India, who claims he radicalized Dartmouth University with his collegian conservative newspaper (many aspects of the life of D’Souza and Obama are “recreated” in the film). With attention from neo-conservatives, D’Souza eventually takes a picture with President Reagan, where he was an “advisor’ for that administration. The first twenty minutes of the film is about Dinesh, with no point to it afterward.

The basis for D’Souza’s amazing mind reading powers is President Obama’s past. Despite spending most of his life as an American growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, D’Souza focuses on the four years Obama lived in Indonesia (ages six to ten) and the president’s own autobiography, “Dreams from My Father.” Parsing excerpts from the book and traveling to the roots of Obama’s world, D’Souza concludes that the president is an “anti-colonialist.” Shocking!

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “2016: Obama’s America”

Dinesh D’Souza is Adrift in ‘2016: Obama’s America’ Photo credit: Rocky Mountain Pictures

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “2016: Obama’s America”