Only in His Dreams

Dinesh D'Souza traveling through Jakarta, Indonesia, in his movie 2016: Obama's America

Photograph courtesy 2016themovie.com.

The documentary 2016: Obama?s America, Dinesh D?Souza?s film about the president?s intellectual roots, earned more than $6 million over the weekend, good for eighth at the box office. The movie, which will be shown four times a day this week at a site near the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., has been boosted by heavy promotion on conservative talk radio. Last month, David Weigel deconstructed the film, examining D?Souza?s charges that Obama holds ?anti-colonialist? views. His original piece is printed below.

Twenty minutes into a new conservative documentary about Barack Obama, there?s a moment that?ll break a birther?s heart. Dinesh D?Souza, the star and narrator of 2016: Obama?s America, is telling the brief, encyclopedia-entry version of the president?s life. The camera zooms over a map like one of the travel scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark?Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii.

?On August 4, 1961,? says D?Souza, ?Barack Obama II is born in the Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu. His birth is recorded in two local newspapers.?

When I hear that line, my head instinctively swivels to my right, where WorldNetDaily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah is sitting. His website has run hundreds of stories about Barack Obama?s citizenship and birth documents. WND books published Where?s the Birth Certificate?, which unfortunately was published right after the president released the long-form version of the record. You can still buy ?Where?s the REAL Birth Certificate?? merch at the WND store. And now here?s a movie with a $2.5 million budget that?s made more than $80,000 in a four-theater run that tosses all the birther theories aside.

Farah abides. He doesn?t walk out. The movie is really too good to get pedantic about. There are no conspiracy theories about Obama?s birth, religion, Social Security number, passport, or college transcript. Instead, there is a deep dive into Barack Obama?s known Communist associates, his late father?s avowed socialism, and his mother?s radicalism. The first and last stories are backed up with quotes from Dreams From My Father. ?That?s Dinesh,? says co-producer Doug Sain. ?He walks on solid ground.?

Let?s go with ?mostly solid.? D?Souza?s documentary is based largely on his book The Roots of Obama?s Rage, which itself grew out of D?Souza?s Forbes cover story, one of the most influential of the decade. Obama, according to D?Souza, was an anti-colonialist. ?He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder,? wrote D?Souza. ?Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America.? Newt Gingrich recommended the theory to reporters?technically speaking, to Robert Costa and me. David Koch repeated it to a sympathetic Matthew Continetti.

The theory was Swiss-cheesed with logic holes. D?Souza found great significance in how Obama ?demonizes his predecessor and his opponent,? as if only anti-colonialists did this. D?Souza insisted that Obama using the Gulf oil spill crisis to call BP ?British Petroleum? is Anglophobia, revealed! But Obama didn?t call BP ?British Petroleum.?

None of this makes it into 2016. We?re taught the controversy, with a montage of D?Souza defending his thesis in front of hostile interviewers. (There?s a sort of George Romero irony to these scenes, as D?Souza is filleted on shows like Countdown and Parker/Spitzer. They?re gone. He?s still here.) We?re shown just how deeply D?Souza researched this?shot of him thumbing through Dreams before boarding an Indonesian scooter, learning to hula in Hawaii, delivering three goats to buy an interview with Obama?s paternal grandmother Sarah. She turns him down. There is no Michael Moore-style waiting in the weeds to ambush a source.

But there?s plenty of the Moore style. D?Souza is sold to us as a smart, patriotic innocent abroad, who just wants to piece a mystery together. Almost every clue fits the puzzle. An old associate of Obama Sr. says the son and the father are basically the same. (Dad dreamed of 100 percent taxation; Junior dreams of a top marginal rate of 39.6 percent.) D?Souza asks one of Ann Dunham?s professors if Obama?s mother had taught the son to idolize his father. ?I hadn?t thought of that!? she says. ?I think you?re right.? D?Souza walks the grounds of Obama?s high school, where they teach ?oppression studies, if you will.?

You don?t travel that far without scoring some points. D?Souza gives considerable screen time to Paul Kengor, a (recent) scholar of Obama?s teenage mentor Frank Marshall Davis. Kengor?s bang-on right: Davis was an avowed Communist, and the media of 2008 didn?t care.

Still, the Davis story is complicated. Becoming a Soviet dupe, as Davis did, meant something for midcentury African-Americans that it doesn?t mean today. Obama never pretended not to know Davis, or pretended that he was some Rockefeller Republican, or turned him into a composite character. He appears in Dreams as ?Frank,? a ?dashiki-wearing? friend talking ?black power.? This is a movie, sure, and you can?t lard it up with every little detail, but D?Souza?s question-begging and omissions lead him to oversell what he?s got.

Early on in the drama, D?Souza proffers this list of Obama?s ?really unusual decisions, decisions you would never see a typical Democrat make.? He?s edited out some of the clunkers from his book. This is the top-shelf vino.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=9f9cfeb1595e47dbd4f06d9559a5c793

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