2016: Obama's America

By Mike Rosen

Never, before 2008, had Americans elected an American president about whom we knew so little. What we did know about him, or thought we knew, came largely from two books he wrote mostly about himself — at least one of which may have been ghost written. (One suspect is his friend, Bill Ayers, the 1960s terrorist and co-founder of the radical Weather Underground.)

A just-released documentary film, "2016: Obama's America," offers a different picture of Barack Obama and the dangers of another four years of his rule. The filmmakers are Gerald Molen, producer of the Academy Award-winning movie "Schindler's List," and Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative intellectual, a think-tank veteran, author and current president of King's College in New York. D'Souza, now an American citizen, was born in India and is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where he was an early contributor to the "Dartmouth Review," a campus, alternative conservative publication.

The documentary is based on two of D'Souza's books, "The Roots of Obama's Rage" and "Obama's America — Unmaking the American Dream." It's a scholarly work. D'Souza traveled to Kenya, Indonesia and Hawaii to interview Obama relatives and acquaintances who knew him, his father and mother. Ironically, much of the film is narrated by Obama himself, with passages from the audio version of his memoir, "Dreams From my Father." Obama is indicted by his own words such as this sophomoric platitude, "On this earth, one nation is not so different from another." Really? Like North Korea vs. Switzerland? Iran vs. Israel? Nazi Germany vs. the U.S.?

D'Souza introduces us to Obama's ideological "founding fathers" like Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who mentored Obama in Hawaii; Edward Said, the radical Palestinian at Harvard; Brazilian socialist Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who taught Obama at Columbia; the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of "God damn America" fame; and his Chicago neighbor and political fundraiser, Bill Ayers. We learn of the politics and philosophy of his mother, Ann Dunham, and his father. This entire collection is a monopoly of leftists with a fundamental animus toward America. Conservative ideas are foreign to the man.

D'Souza's theory is that Obama's misgoverning of America isn't ineptitude. It's the deliberate application of his vision, the product of his early programming with a one-sided, anti-Western, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist world view, resentfully invested in the simplistic premise that exploitive colonial nations are solely responsible for Third World poverty.

It explains much of Obama's foreign policy, his apology tours, kowtowing to heads of state and his designs on redistributing American wealth to poorer nations under the cover of global warming treaties. It also plays to the Marxist narrative of rich vs. poor class warfare, which is evident in Obama's domestic demagoguery.

D'Souza isn't a conspiracy theorist. He hasn't invented the anti-colonialist screed. It's proudly and openly on display throughout American universities. Tenured, Blame-America-First academics have built careers on it. Of course, oppression and exploitation were evident in colonialism. It's the nature of world history. It couldn't have been otherwise. The United Nations wasn't around to check the Persian or the Roman Empires. But for all the excesses of British colonialism, India, now the world's most populous democracy, was the beneficiary of its historic influence; others too, like the U.S.

Michael Moore's leftist schlockumentaries, stacked with misrepresentations, outright lies and cheap theatrics, were showered with free publicity by fawning ideological bedfellows in the liberal media and entertainment culture. Predictably, their reaction to "2016," when it hasn't been defamatory, has been to ignore it, hoping it will go away with little notice. With a tiny marketing budget, "2016" is doing remarkably well, thanks to word-of-mouth endorsements. It's very well done. Make a point of seeing it, now playing in a number of metro theaters. Bring a swing-voting friend or even a former Obamaphile with buyer's remorse. It might swing the election.

Freelance columnist Mike Rosen's radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.

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