Review of 2016: Obama's America (2012) by Stanley B — 02 Nov 2012

Yikes, this is scary stuff!

In this film, Dinesh D'Souza attempts to lull the viewer into a sense of safety while giving pieces of President Obama's past history while feeding in Rush Limbaugh like deceptions from the far right in small doses to see how long he can hold people with half truths.

About an hour in, he seems to go off of his meds and comepletely looses the plot. It is at this point that he bascially makes the claim that Obama is a sort of secret agent that has managed to infiltrate the USA at the hightes levels with the express intent of decreasing the power of the USA, allowing Iran to become nuclear, and drive us so far into debt that we collapse.

He also can't help but insert himself and his book into the film through interviews that he did after it and a magazine article of his were published. He claims that the accusations of Obama being Muslim and trying to kill America to not have worked.

He does not outwardly state it, but in a way implies through the film that since those falsehoods did not work, he would try a different tact of misinformation to bring him down. In this film, he manages to be even more dangerous than those ridiculous claims were.

I read that D'Souza got advice on how to layout the movie from Michael Moore. I have serious hatred for Moore's "gotchamentaries" and I feel that this film tries to do the same in the same sublte way that Moore did at time with Bowling for Columbine before going completely whacko with his subsequent films.

It's all too bad. The movie is very slick. It is filmed very well and travels around the world for interviews. If done by a director who was more independent of the work and wanted to just make a compelling dive into Obama's history and what makes him what he is, this could have really worked.

Instead, we get a piece of propaganda that at times made me laugh at how far he would go for a shock and the make me cringe as I realized how many people would swallow the bait and turn the falsehoods around as facts.