Columnist Richard Roeper has taken a look at the Dinesh D’Souza documentary “2016: Obama’s America,” – a right-leaning film the Associated Press has taken to task – which has exploded from showing on a single screen in Houston to more than 1,700 screens nationwide.
Some of Roeper’s thoughts:
The success comes despite mostly scathing reviews from that left-leaning, lamestream liberal media and fact-checked articles that cast serious doubts about some of the film’s claims. (Before we proceed: yes, I have criticized Michael Moore for the grandstanding, time-shifting, sometimes fact-challenged theatrics in his films.) As the Associated Press has pointed out, D’Souza talks about Obama returning a bust of Winston Churchill to the British as if it were an act of disrespect to our ally, even though the bust was on loan to the Bush administration and was scheduled to be returned. The film also faults Obama for the escalation of the national debt (certainly true) but fails to mention the Bush administration’s role in that escalation; claims Obama is sympathetic to jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan but never mentions the killing of bin Laden, and paints slanted, incomplete pictures of Obama’s views on the Falklands and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. D’Souza’s movie is equal parts anti-Obama infomercial, fear-mongering screed and psychoanalysis from afar. Traveling to Hawaii, Kenya and Indonesia, interviewing like-minded academics and a few fringe figures from Obama’s past, D’Souza pushes his theory that Obama is an anti-American, anti-colonialist whose father is the dominant guiding force in his life. . . . At times 2016 plays like a parody of an anti-Obama film. Ominous music, visuals of storm clouds gathering, a map showing the Middle East becoming The United States of Islam, split-screen images of the White House and the shack in Nairobi that houses Obama’s half-brother.
