2016: Dinesh D'Souza's Exercise in Ego and Delusion

[xocet]

Recently, there has been some discussion of Dinesh D'Souza's not getting proper respect for his recent "documentary":

EXCLUSIVE: ’2016 Obama’s America’ Filmmaker Reacts To President’s Slam; Looking For Network To Air Before Election; Says Mainstream Media Refusing Coverage

By DOMINIC PATTEN | Tuesday September 11, 2012

...

DEADLINE: What do you think of the criticism the film has received?
D’SOUZA: The criticism of the film actually bothers me less than the neglect of the film. If I were Michael Moore and I were to make a film that was the No. 2 political documentary of all time, I would be on every network. I would be on Meet The Press, and I would be profiled in The New York Times, and I would be all over MSNBC. Instead large sectors of the press are refusing to cover the film. They are just pretending it doesn’t exist.

...

http://www.deadline.com/2012/09/exclusive-2016-obamas-america-filmmaker-reacts-to-presidents-slam-looking-for-network-to-air-before-election-says-mainstream-media-refusing-coverage/

Naturally, there is a good reason why D'Souza has gotten little of the coverage which apparently he so desperately desires - what follows is a short review of his film:

Review of 2016: Obama's America

D'Souza's film is based on the premise that President Obama (due to the psychological effects of the absence of the President's father in his son's life) is compelled to fulfill what D'Souza claims are President Obama's father's goals or dreams.

D'Souza implicitly claims that President Obama wants to make up for "neocolonialism" by weakening the US's influence in the world (by unilaterally reducing the US nuclear arsenal as much as possible) and simultaneously by allowing the US to be drained of its wealth (by compensatorily transferring it to the countries that suffered under "neocolonialism&quot .

Throughout the movie, there is a frequent display of poverty in the third world; i.e., ostensibly in parts of Indonesia and in parts of Africa. D'Souza, near the end of the movie, informs his audience that US citizens are rich by comparison to the average individual living in the third world. Thus, the conclusion that D'Souza presumably wants to terrorize his audience into thinking is that President Obama is going to reduce the average, lower middle-class US citizen to the abject level of poverty that has been so frequently seen up to this point in the film. This seems to be the film's essential point to its newly fiscally "conservative" target audience of Independents and Republicans.

Another theme that the movie presents is that President Obama sympathizes with jihadis. (Notably, Osama bin Laden could refute that delusion were he alive to be asked.)

Still another unsurprising theme that manifests itself near the end of the film is the implicit need to fear Islam and an Islamic world conquest.

Beyond these few points, the rest of the film is essentially unremarkable with respect to its content: the content is that of a propaganda piece.

The quality of production is poor - for example, in one interview scene, the camera operator focuses on the back of the chair in which D'Souza is sitting instead of keeping D'Souza's face in focus while D'Souza is posing a question to his subject.

Perhaps it was this focus on an empty chair that inspired Clint Eastwood.

In summary, this film is purely a propaganda piece that is not worth wasting either money or time on.