Few people can argue that the country has worked well during
the four years that Obama has been president. Nor can they argue that, relative
to all of those who have served in that office since George Washington, Obama
has been the most radical in terms of where mainstream America is – which would
make his reelection inexplicable.
When he persuaded a majority of Americans to vote for him in
2008, Obama did so promising that he would remake America. Whatever “remake”
meant in his mind – and I’ve never been convinced that American society,
including his supporters, fully understood it – his policies aren’t working.
The country is divided. Unemployment has risen under his watch. Debt has
skyrocketed. Economic growth is glacial.
Why? Is the man incompetent? Or is the chaos he has caused
his real intent? When you think about it, doesn’t the answer have to be one or
the other?
Dinesh D’Souza’s new film, 2016: Obama’s America, explores those questions and asks what
America will look like in four more years – in 2016 – if Obama is reelected.
The film is being promoted by conservative talk show hosts –
Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved, for example – who are thoughtful and balanced,
not bombasts like Rush Limbaugh. In contrast, the film’s opponents on the left
have condemned it with a vengeance (I’ve read as many of their reviews as I
could find.) With that much smoke, there’s fire somewhere, so several weeks ago
I went to see 2016.
When the unknown 33-year old Barack Obama wrote his
autobiography, Dreams from My Father,
he revealed a young man in search of his identity. D’Souza employs this book to
take the film’s viewers on a similar search to understand Obama. D’Souza
contends that Obama was greatly influenced by the anti-colonial views of his
Kenyan father and to prove that contention, viewers are taken to Hawaii and
Indonesia, where the young Obama was raised and influenced, and then the camera
travels to Kenya – to the grave of his father – where Obama’s alleged
self-discovery occurred.
The film was adapted from D’Souza’s most recent books, The Roots of Obama's Rage and Obama's America: Unmaking the American Dream,
and it was produced by Gerald Molen, who won an Oscar for Schindler’s List and produced Jurassic
Park and Hook. D’Souza co-wrote,
co-directed, and narrated the film as the viewers’ host.
Since there’s no “the butler did it” in this film, I don’t have
to give a “Spoiler Warning” to the readers of this blog, but notwithstanding my
comments, I recommend that everyone see the film and reach their own conclusion
on its merit.
As most people know, Obama is the offspring of a white
mother and black father. Both were dysfunctional and both were ideological
radicals. Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, despised America. D’Souza points
out that Obama’s maternal grandfather held left-leaning political views.
His father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was a senior level
economist in the Kenyan government who, according to those who knew him,
carried an anti-colonial grudge against the rich western countries which, he
believed, had pillaged the natural wealth of third world countries. The fact
that the parents met in a
Russian class in 1960 suggests where both were politically during the
apogee of the Cold War.
Obama Sr. and Dunham married in 1961 and Obama Jr. was born
six months later. Obama Sr. revealed to Dunham after their marriage that he had
been married and divorced in Kenya, which was a lie, Dunham discovered. He was
still married.
The couple separated within the year. Obama Sr. graduated
from the University of Hawaii with an economics degree and was elected to Phi
Beta Kappa after which he left Hawaii for the mainland to attend graduate
school at Harvard before returning to Kenya. There he fathered several more children
by different women whom he physically abused. As he slipped into alcoholism and
poverty, Obama Sr. had two serious car crashes, the second of which claimed
both legs, and then in 1982 he was killed in a third car crash.
Dunham divorced Obama Sr. several years after they separated
and shortly after she married an Indonesian, Lolo Soetoro, who was living in
Hawaii while he attended college. When his visa expired the couple moved to
Indonesia, but after several years, D’Souza notes, Dunham sent Obama Jr. back
to Hawaii to live with his grandparents in order to remove him from the
influence of Soetoto whose pro-American views (he worked for American oil
companies and fought communists while in the Indonesian army) ran counter to
her political views.
With young Obama’s return, Dunham instructed her
father to engage his friend, Frank Davis, to mentor her son. Davis was a card-carrying
communist and a black nationalist. Vladimir Lenin said, "Give me four
years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be
uprooted." So it may have been with little Obama. The film leaves one
wondering how much of Frank Davis’ influence has become a part of Obama’s
worldview.
In time Obama’s grandparents enrolled him in Punahou, an
elite college prep school founded in 1841, which put him in close association
with children of privilege, mostly white and mostly from politically liberal
families. Not surprisingly, given the influence of Davis and Punahou, Obama was
drawn more to the left in college, which he reveals in his autobiographical Dreams from My Father:
To avoid being
mistaken for a sell-out, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically
active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist
professors and structured feminists and punk-rock performance poets[.] ... We
were alienated.
The influence of Frank Davis continued into Obama’s
adulthood as he associated in varying degrees with people whom D’Souza calls
Obama’s “Founding Fathers” – Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground
communist revolutionary group that bombed public buildings; Edward Said, a
bright and well-educated anti-Israel leftist of Palestinian descent; Jeremiah
Wright, the hate-spewing preacher of “God damn America” fame whose church Obama
attended for 23 years and who performed the marriage ceremony for the Obamas;
and Roberto Unger, one of Obama’s Harvard law professors and a 2008 campaign advisor.
Unger is now advocating against Obama’s reelection because he has not been
leftist enough as president. Wright became the most public of Obama’s radical
associations, and perhaps the most embarrassing during the 2008 campaign, but
in Dreams from My Father, Obama was
moved to tears by a Wright sermon in which his minister proclaimed "white
folks' greed runs a world in need."
Pointing out that Obama’s autobiography is entitled Dreams from My Father rather than “of my
father,” D’Souza theorizes that Obama was influenced by the anti-west politics
of his father and travels to Kenya to corroborate his claims. There he
interviews the family and friend of the late Obama Sr., among them one of the
many sons he sired, George, who was born only a few months before the fatal
accident that took his father. George obviously doesn’t hold his father’s
anti-colonial views because he opines that Kenya might be better off today if the
white man had stayed. Asked by D’Souza if he feels abandoned by another son of
his father who has become President of the United States, George is nonplussed
and mumbles something about his half-brother having a country to run.
D’Souza is less successful in getting Granny Obama on
camera. Even though he bought three goats as her speaking fee, she changed her
mind or was persuaded to change it and declined the interview. But he did get
Philip Ochieng, the lifelong friend of Obama Sr., to agree to an interview. Ochieng
characterized Obama Sr. as "totally anti-colonial" and tossed in a
few negative assessments of his own concerning American foreign policy.
Perhaps the most dramatic scene during the Kenyan visit was
the reenactment of Obama as a young adult visiting the grave of his father. He
relates the experience in Dreams:
“I learned long ago to
distrust my childhood and the stories that shaped it. It was only many years
later, after I sat at my father’s grave and spoken to him through Africa’s red
soil, that I could circle back and evaluate these early stories for myself.”
D’Souza argues that Obama’s worldview is influenced by the
politics of his father (and even more likely, his “Founding Father” mentors.)
Critics say such an assertion is preposterous since the father abandoned the
son at the age of two and visited him only once at age ten. Yet it is well
established that children who lose a parent at a young age create a “larger
than life” image of the departed parent resplendent with virtue and absent of
warts. Only Obama knows if he has done this, but his autobiography indicates
some kind of awakening occurred beside his father’s grave. And the fact that he
would journey to Kenya and the grave of the father who abandoned him – with
whom he had no personal relationship – speaks volumes of his desire to connect
to his father’s world.
Whatever the father’s influence or his “Founding Fathers’”
influence, D’Souza implicitly asks viewers to explain Obama returning the bust
of Churchill to England almost immediately upon moving into the White House.
Was this associated with Kenya’s former colonial status in the United Kingdom? How
does one explain that, asked several months ago about Argentina’s claim to the
Falkland Islands, Obama refused to support the British claim to them, despite the
3,000 British subjects living there? He even referred to the Falklands as Malvinas,
the Argentine name for the Falklands.
If D’Souza’s argument is false that Obama is ideologically committed
to end America’s dominance in the world, how does one explain his opposition to
the Keystone XL pipeline that would produce possibly ten
billion dollars in economic benefits and over 15,000 jobs at a time when 22
million are unemployed … yet he allows billions of taxpayer dollars to Brazil,
Mexico, and Columbia?
Why is Obama patently anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian when
Israel has been America’s only true ally in the Middle East for 65 years?
Why
did he instruct NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, “to find a way to
reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim
nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science,
math and engineering”?
D’Souza asks why did Obama intervene in Libya
but not Syria? Why did he urge Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of this
country, to step down in Egypt, creating a leadership vacuum that was filled by
the militant Muslim Brotherhood during the “Arab Spring” uprising, but he gave
no encouragement to the Iranians who launched and died in the “green
revolution” against their corrupt mullahs? And just as Iran is about to “go
nuclear” why is Obama signing a treaty that will reduce our nuclear warheads
from 5,000 to 2,500?
How could a man who is as presumptively bright and
well-educated as Obama spend a trillion dollars more than the US government
takes in from taxes in each of four years, adding $5 trillion in new debt,
D’Souza asks as he shows a graph? The national debt has doubled under Obama,
and he and his predecessor have piled up more debt than the 42 previous
presidents combined.
Perhaps the unnerving questions asked and evidence offered
by D’Souza’s 2016 have contributed to
the success of the film, which has become the highest grossing political
documentary second only to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit
9/11. Since its release it has grossed over $26 million and is in 2,000
theaters until mid-October. After that DVD and home box office will make
viewing possible up to the 2012 election on November 6.
The audience with whom I saw the film applauded at its
conclusion. As I passed knots of theater-goers afterward on the way to my car,
I could hear them talking about the film. None made fun of it as conspiracy
theory propaganda. I suspect that most were wondering what America would look
like in 2016 if we have four more years of Obama. I know I was.
That Obama has downsized our economy, our domestic
production of energy, our nuclear arsenal, and our influence in the world is
unimpeachable by the Left. His bowing to foreign leaders, his apologies to the
world for past transgressions by the US, his lionizing the importance of the
Muslim world and its alleged accomplishments are inexplicable … unless he is
incompetent … or unless he has an agenda in which these are purposely a part.
Which is it? “Love him or hate him: you don’t know him,” D’Souza claims.
Well, maybe so in 2008. Less so in 2012.
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