2016: Obama's America - A Review

 “2016” is a documentary the entertainment industry didn’t expect to do well at the box office.  It is, after all, a documentary, and who spends $12 and more per ticket to go see a documentary?  But the entertainment industry exists in a cocoon – a Liberal cocoon – where they expect only the young to go see movies with Liberal themes.  A Conservative documentary?  Please.

However, within a week or so of its release, audiences were clamoring to see the film.  Initially, it was released in only two theaters in northern New Jersey.  Thanks to word of mouth and Conservative radio, TV, and alternative media talk show hosts, the film has gained widespread release and wound up No. 4 at the box office.  The movie would have ranked even higher in box office dollars, only many audience members are seniors with discounts.

“2016” (as it is commonly known) is based on two best-sellers by author and president of King’s College Dinesh D’Souza” – his “2010, The Roots of Obama’s Rage” and his new, 2012 “Obama’s America:  Unmaking the American Dream.”

The movie is a distillation of the two books, with some additional, interesting information.  D’Souza is a noted Conservative, detested by the Liberal Media.   A native of Mumbai (Bombay), India, he came to the United States as a high school student because he wanted to follow the American dream of a better education and life, something he said he couldn’t find in India.

Two books were necessary because D’Souza started out writing one book – “Rage” – and in writing it, found himself in the end, writing quite a different book.  Initially, he was an admirer of Obama’s.  He said he could identify with Obama’s Third World upbringing.  Conservatives, he felt were being too harsh on the future president during the campaign.

During the 2007-2008 campaign, a TV host noted that we didn’t know much about Obama.  His guest (I can’t remember who it was right now – probably Newt Gingrich) responded, “Read his two books.  You’ll find out everything you need to know right there and you won’t have any doubts.”  He tells you himself that he plans to destroy America.

Still, D’Souza was intrigued by Obama.  Here he was, the product of a Third World upbringing.  He was the same age as D’Souza.  He went to Ivy League schools.  He married the same year as D’Souza and his wife.  Coming from a Third World country, D’Souza felt he and Obama shared a similar view of colonialism.  D’Souza grandfather had served the British during India’s colonial period.  Both grandfathers suffered abuse, as well as Obama’s stepfather Lolo Soetoro in Indonesia.

D’Souza, in the first book, asks his readers to have patience and put on the anti-Imperialist glasses to see where a Third Worlder like Obama is coming from.  It’s a painful, wincing account of Great Britain’s occupation of these countries.

Obama’s campaign managers tried to distance themselves from D’Souza’s charges.  But D’Souza pointed out, it was right there in Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father.  D’Souza read both books and then decided to research Obama’s background himself, to verify the facts.

Obama’s parents were Barrack Hussein Obama Sr. and Stanley Ann Dunham.  They were both radical socialists, even communists, atheists, and anti-colonialists.  They met in college during a Russian class, and married.  Obama failed to mention to his new bride, that he already had a wife and children back in Kenya.  When Obama was still a baby, Barack Sr. abandoned Ann and the baby to study at Harvard University.  There, he met yet another white woman, whom he also married and took back to Kenya with him, to the Lulo tribe, where polygamy is an accepted custom.  Barack Sr. and Ann were divorced in 1964.

Ann then met Lolo Suetoro, an anti-colonialist Indonesian.  They married and moved to Indonesia.  Ann, who had a taste for dark-skinned, Third World men, eventually found herself disenchanted with her second husband.  The anti-colonialist Indonesia president, Suarno, whom Ann idolized more than her own husband, D’Souza tells us, was replaced in time by a pro-Western, pro-Capitalist president.  Lolo took a job with an American oil company and began, like Indonesia, to prosper.  The country was doing well, Lolo was doing well, and even Obama was doing well, taking a liking to his stepfather.  But Ann was unhappy.  One day, she was watching Lolo playing with Obama in their marshy front yard.  There, D’Souza tells us, she saw Lolo’s foot prints, and little Barry’s (his name was unofficially altered) following him.  Ann didn’t want her son growing up influenced by her now-Westernized husband.

She sent Barry packing off to Hawaii to live with her parents.  Stanley Dunham had a decidedly Leftist bent.  He felt little Barry needed a black mentor, so he introduced the boy at about the age of 10, to his hard-drinking, womanizing poker buddy and card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, Frank Marshall Davis. 

Meanwhile, Ann filled her son’s head with tales of his absentee father’s genius and anti-colonialist principles.  She still adored her ex-husband.  Barry only saw his father at one period in his life, for about a month.  According to D’Souza, Barack Sr. was handsome, stylish, charming, and an amazing storyteller.  He mesmerized his son during a classroom visit with tales of Africa.  Little Barry was hooked and idolized his father, even after he vanished.  He never saw him again, but they maintained a correspondence by letter.

It was only in college that he learned the truth about his father, a wife-beating, alcoholic who wasn’t as influential in Kenya as Ann had told her son.  He failed the examination to get into college in Hawaii and prevailed upon two Christian missionaries, lying about his position in government, to get them to underwrite his trip to Hawaii.  Hawaii was a fertile ground for anti-colonialism.  The island had been annexed by in the 1890s by William McKinley, and given statehood in 1959, only two years before Barry’s birth. 

Feelings still ran hard among the native population, and anti-colonialists like Obama Sr. found it a perfect breeding ground for stirring up discontent and revolution, blaming the planters who came to the island to build sugar plantations for “exploiting” the natives, just as the Dutch and English “exploited” Africans for the continent’s diamonds, and later, oil, and as the Dutch had “exploited” Indonesia’s and the Philippine’s locations in the Pacific for trading.

D’Souza explains that Barack Sr.’s death in 1962, when Barry was about 21, hit the young man very hard.  But more devastating was his half-sister’s revelations about the father’s many flaws.  (He died in a drunken driving accident, slamming his car into a tree.  In previous drunken accidents, he killed a man in one, and lost both his legs in another).  What’s more, Barack Sr. had achieved what little success he really enjoyed through charisma and the mask of deceit.

Barry’s turning point was a visit to his father’s grave when he was 26.  Devastated at the loss of this absentee father and role model, and the discovery of his flaws, Barry threw himself on his father’s grave and wept.  But then, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, he picked himself up and emerged Barack Hussein Obama Jr.  He vowed to reject his father’s flaws and take up his father’s dreams – of anti-colonialism and socialism – and carry his father’s dream on to reality.

D’Souza tell us, in the book, that Obama’s agenda was not one of racism or religion (both parents were atheists, Lolo was an indifferent Muslim, and all Obama’s subsequent mentors, with the except of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, were atheists).  No, it was all about the class struggle.  The rich versus the poor.  The anti-colonialists versus the neoimperialists (according anti-colonial scholars, since Great Britain was divested of most of her colonies, America has taken up her mantle through the guise of Capitalism).  Obama’s mission, his dream from (from, not of, as D’Souza points out), was to turn the imperialist world on his head, shake the change loose from their pockets, and “equitably” distribute the wealth among the poorer nations.

This is a distinction D’Souza warns us that we’re not making.  When Obama speaks of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, he’s not talking about rich Americans versus poor Americans.  As far as he’s concerned, and in the worldview, even the poorest Americans are wealthy by Third World standards.  Obama means to divest America of all her wealth and distribute it among the nations of the world.  And, as D’Souza doesn’t even need to tell us, really, Obama is doing a fine job of ruining our economy.

D’Souza’s books and his movie contain important information, and yields a clue as to why Obama was able to win over so many white voters:  he played upon white guilt over slavery and racism, and he played the white voters like a violin.  D’Souza’s theory is that white voters, looking for absolution, found it in this black candidate for president.  Vote for him and they would be “absolved” from all charges of racism, for they had voted for this black candidate.

They could find no fault in his appearance.  He was friendly, well-dressed, articulate (at least according to some), and likeable.  What’s more his 2004 address to the Democrat National Convention sounded like any, all-American Conservative speech.  D’Souza notes – and you can see and hear the speech in the documentary – he sounded like Reagan.  Why wouldn’t white voters vote for him?  He was careful to wear the mask, to sound like those whose votes he was soliciting, and admitted himself that he wanted to avoid coming across like the angry black man they feared.

Even when they disagreed with him, white voters couldn’t bring themselves to “hate” him enough to criticize, even if they didn’t for him.  “What can I say?  I like the guy.”  Those who knew the truth, had heard his words, “I want to transform America”  and “redistribute the wealth” didn’t even need to read Obama’s two autobiographies to know the truth.  Still, those who had read them declared that between the covers was one very angry black man.

That, D’Souza says, is what got him elected.  The author admits he fell for this act in the beginning.  He read the books, wanting to find the roots of the connection between himself and Obama.  They were basically the same color.  But upon more careful research in writing his own book, what D’Souza discovered were, literally, the roots of Obama’s rage.

Because my mother fell ill on the Saturday we were supposed to go see the documentary, we went to see the movie on Sunday instead.  As a consequence, we were in an audience about the same age, or therebouts, as my mother.  Mom came away from the movie feeling depressed, she said.  I asked her how she could have been surprised.  She and my father brought me up very Conservative.  They tried with my brothers.  They succeeded with the younger, and to a lesser degree, with the older, the one who caved in to the communist high school teacher.

“You yourself told us when we were children that all this was coming, Mom.  You predicted exactly all of this.  You knew it was coming and so did Dad.”

“Yes,” she replied.  “But I thought people would fight harder.  I didn’t think people could be so stupid and gullible.”

I told her not to blame herself.  None of us voted for the guy and I helped one of the Tea Parties get started.  I even gave a speech.  In Mom’s view, it’s hopeless.  “White people shouldn’t even bother having children.”  Now that he’s already in power, she feels, it’s too late.

But D’Souza’s books, if nothing else, serve as final warning that if we don’t wake up those who are still asleep, admiring themselves, even as Obama admires himself, for being “post-racial” and not look below the surface at this man’s true agenda, we will be ruined economically.  Obama means to reduce America’s status as a “superpower” and defender of freedom (and thereby, free trade.

I disagree with D’Souza only on one point.  He declares that Obama is not anti-American.  Yet his parents, his grandparents, and all of his mentors were.  I agree that he’s probably not a Muslim, although Obama certainly displays Muslim sympathies, which D’Souza says are only a mask for his real goal of anti-colonialism (Israel being the virus of the Middle East, in the anti-colonial view).  Obama had no qualms about ordering the assassination of Osama Bin Laden because he had taken his fight from the home ground, which is an anti-colonialist no-no.

Obama deliberately, and admittedly, surrounded himself with and sought after, associates with anti-American views.  Maybe D’Souza’s Third World sympathies cause him to cling to some hope that Obama is not all bad, and decidedly anti-American.  Like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, he believes there’s still some good in him.

Obama’s story is a rather twisted version of the Star Wars saga.  We should be very alarmed by Obama’s embracing of myths and fabulism, rather than reality.  Tyrants are often the stuff of legends, idolatry, self-delusion, and lies.  Michelle Malkin referred to it as the “Cult of Obama.”  We all know how cults work out.  We know how difficult “reprogramming” cult members is.

Still, this is reality.  My parents, being reporters, discouraged me from dreaming.  They always insisted on my facing the truth, and searching for the truth.  I knew the truth, before I ever read D’Souza’s books.  I knew it, growing up in America in the Sixties.  I heard it for myself.  I’ve even heard William Ayers (now much older) speak.

No one can accept the truth (especially if they’ve been brainwashed) from a second or third party.  They must seek it for themselves.  That search requires a degree of trust from those who urge you to seek it, as my parents did.  It also requires courage.  I could read undaunted.  I trusted my reality-based, Conservative parents, my best mentors.  To get those who’ve been duped to see this movie and maybe even read D’Souza’s books, as well as others, will require that we get the younger generation to trust us.

I would suggest Mom’s tactic, when my classmates were trying to tempt me into some unwise action or other.  “They’re strangers,” said she.  “They’re not even your friends.  They’ve never been friends.  You know that.  I’m your mother.  We’re family.  I’ve been here for you, always.  Have they?  They don’t care about you.  They don’t love you.  Who do you think you can trust more?  Them or your family?”

D’Souza’s pleas are not based on emotions but upon facts, numbers, statistics, and well-calculated predictions about our economy.  At the end of “Roots,” D’Souza writes on page 222 of the paperback edition, at the end of the Acknowledgements chapter:

Some individuals who have helped me with this book have asked that their names not be used; they are worried they might attract the unhelpful scrutiny of the Obama Administration.

“Trust me,” says one of them, “You don’t want those guys coming after you.”

As you see from these pages, I am not waiting for them to come after me; I am going after them, and with the greatest weapon of all – the truth.”

We cannot wait too long, though.  The election is only two months away.  What's more, I was going to end with D’Souza’s quote, but even as I was reading through the quote and getting ready to type it, yet another blast shook the windows of my bedroom.  The blasts are so enormous that they’re actually registering as small earthquakes.  They’re coming from the Smart Growth Towers project, only five minutes away on the other side of Federal Hill.  They are part of what is NOW called the Building One America project, enacted in 2011 (and the subject of yet another book on Obama, about his war on the suburbs), in which homeowners will be either taxed or over-leveraged out of their homes and into high-density housing projects, like this one being built, near big cities and welfare recipients will be moved into the suburban homes of the former property owners.

Those blasts are not just the sound of 30 tons of granite and rock being displaced;  it is the thunder of America's destruction.  Our world – our America is being blasted apart.  The time to act is now.  Get your family and friends, especially your children (school-aged, teenaged, grown, or in arrested development) to the movie theaters to see 2016:  Obama’s America.  Call it a political intervention.

They must know the truth.  It’s their future that’s at stake.

Trust me.