A Republican friend posted on FB that he liked the anti-Obama film 2016: Obama's America, and said that the theater, in the south, broke out in applause at the end. He asked me to go see it.
I think I managed to shut him up... below the fold.
First, a review, for those of you not familiar with this anti-Obama propaganda film.
Washington Post:
In ‘2016,’ Obama is fear itself
By Michael O’Sullivan
Friday, August 24, 2012
“I’m not trying to bash Obama in a crude way,” Dinesh D’Souza says in a TV news clip featured in the conservative writer and commentator’s new documentary “2016: Obama’s America.” It’s a comment recycled from one of D’Souza’s many media appearances in defense of his well-known, earlier attacks on the president, both in a controversial 2010 Forbes magazine cover story and two subsequent books, on which this film is based.
One thing can be said for “2016.” It’s anything but crude. The best infomercials rarely are.
And, make no mistake, D’Souza’s documentary profile of President Obama -- which is like his earlier writing attempts to portray its subject as not just anti-capitalist but anti-American -- is just that: a slick infomercial. As these things go, the movie seems destined to irritate the president’s supporters while mobilizing his detractors, even as it is doomed to win precious few converts. It’s a textbook example of preaching to the choir.
D’Souza, who narrates the film with the buttery smoothness of a therapist, intersperses talking-head interviews with footage of himself poring over Obama’s memoir “Dreams from My Father,” like a psychological detective, while visiting Indonesia, Hawaii and Kenya. As readers of the Forbes article know, the central thesis of “2016” is that Obama’s worldview -- his “compass,” as D’Souza calls it -- was largely shaped by the anti-colonialist, anti-white and anti-Christian politics of Obama’s supposedly radical Kenyan father. Never mind that Obama, growing up, spent precious little time with the man, who for most of his son’s early life was estranged from Obama’s mother. D’Souza trots out a professional psychologist to speculate on how the senior Obama’s absence reinforced his influence, rather than weakened it.
D’Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you’re predisposed to believe that Obama hates America. It’s bashing, all right, but with a velvet-gloved fist.
Why is the film called “2016”? D’Souza’s one-sided argument ultimately stoops to fear-mongering of the worst kind, stating in no uncertain terms that, if the president is reelected, the world four years from now will be darkened by the clouds of economic collapse, World War III (thanks to the wholesale renunciation of our nuclear superiority) and a terrifyingly ascendant new “United States of Islam” in the Middle East. These assertions are accompanied by footage of actual dark clouds and horror-movie music.
The real bogeyman isn’t Obama, who D’Souza acknowledges can come across as an appealing and charismatic leader. That honor is shared by several men D’Souza refers to as Obama’s “founding fathers,” in an unsubtle dig at the president’s patriotism. It’s a group that includes communist Frank Marshall Davis; former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers; academic Edward Said, whose views are described as anti-Zionist; liberal Harvard professor Roberto Unger; and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a proponent of so-called black liberation theology.
None of the names of these putative villains is new, which gives “2016” the air of a “Nightmare on Elm Street” sequel, pandering to the franchise’s hard-core fans, while boring everyone else.
My reply:
"So, if you're going to make an argument that the president is anti-American, a popular paranoid worldview on the right, doesn't that imply you're weak on the actual facts that would support your candidate? For example, to make my own argument for Obama, from the left, I might quote Bill Maher's recent monolog: "...It reminds me of health care. Republicans are for all the popular things, like covering people with pre-existing conditions, but they're not for the part where you pay for it, like the mandate. Just like they were for our recent wars, but not for paying for them. For the prescription drug bill, but not for paying for it." You see, those are all factual. But when you need to impute the patriotism of a constitutional law professor, and an African American who got himself elected president by a majority of Americans, it sounds like your real argument, on the issues, must be weak.
But I'll make you a deal. I've already read Dreams From My Father. If you read that, I'll see your movie.
One last thing. The right spends a lot of time worrying about what's American and what's anti-American. The psychological principle of projection involves accusing others of what you might feel guilty of yourself. So the question is: Why do they need to find the president to be anti-American? In the more factual world, we could question whether, for example, in the recent Debt Limit crisis, when Republican Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell said:
"I think many of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn't think that. What we did think was it's a hostage worth ransoming,"
and that crisis led to America's credit rating being downgraded to AA--wasn't looking at it as a ransom situation that ultimately hurt America, by definition, anti-American? Or, say, of 196,000,000 votes cast in the past five years of the Bush administration, there have been 86 cases of voter fraud, yet the Voter Id laws, 32 of 33 of which are in Republican-led states, may stop 20 million people from voting. So, basically, if I wanted to point fingers and play the anti-American game, I'd be able to do so from a much more substantive basis than, say...speculation on Obama's childhood creating his supposed worldview, based on an analysis of a book that few seeing the movie have likely read. But rather than inflaming anger and fear, it's probably best, again, not to start questioning other American's patriotism, including the president's, and stick to the facts."
...Haven't heard back from my friend. It was either this or defriending him, and my wife made me promise I wouldn't. (She's as big a Dem as I am, but clearly a bad influence. :) Finally, tip of my hat to Bill Maher and Aaron Sorkin