I heard there’s a new documentary about Obama that interviews a plethora of people from the President’s past and purports to present his putrid philosophy and the precarious possibilities for our posterity if his previous policies are permitted to persist for four more years.
The film, titled 2016: Obama’s America, is off to a successful start, expanding to a bunch of theaters and projected to come in at #8 for the weekend. In fact, it’s already the 17th-highest grossing documentary of all time, and with a healthy per-theater average and two solid pre-election months to go, it seems guaranteed to climb higher. Maybe it’ll even dethrone Fahrenheit 9/11 from the top of the All-Time Documentary list (though I always thought it was a stretch to call that thing a documentary).
It looks like there’s a lot of money to be made in criticizing Obama. Some news articles are saying the movie is a “surprise” hit. If anything, I’m surprised it took the anti-Obama capitalists this long to turn conservative opposition into such easy profits.
But is the movie any good?
Well, I thought I’d save you the time and money by watching it myself googling “2016 obama’s america reviews”. Turns out the conservatives think it’s pretty good:
D’Souza’s movie is significant and engrossing… Obama chose to associate with, study under, emulate, and work alongside the worst this nation has to offer. D’Souza’s film is but a visual version of what readers of this site have known for years: Barack Obama may be a natural-born American citizen, and he may be the American president. He may be from America, but he is not of America. Neither is his dream.
The mainstream liberal elite think it’s crap:
D’Souza makes it all sound almost plausible, but only if you’re predisposed to believe that Obama hates America. It’s bashing, all right, but with a velvet-gloved fist.
The libertarians think it’s better-made and even fairer than liberal counterparts that received more media attention, but ultimately unconvincing in its attempts to link Obama’s past friends with his present actions as President:
D’Souza’s argument is that Obama is a uniquely dangerous and insidious one. He may be right about that, but when he tries to make the case the film departs from my reality… Although 2016 does treat Obama’s devastating fiscal legacy, D’Souza and Sullivan’s real passion is for crimes like Obama’s removal of a bust of Winston Churchill from the oval office…
The theme of Obama’s radical anti-Americanism is even less useful in explaining what has been (so far) his most poisonous legacy: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 (a.k.a. Obamacare), which indentures the people not to any politburo or warlord but to insurance companies.
Perhaps unsurprisingly I identify most with the Reason link. Obama really does have a sketchy past, and it’s maddening how obviously deferential the media treated and still treats him compared to Republican campaigners (even in these reviews, Bill Ayers is described by the conservative as a “terrorist” and the libertarian as a “serial terror bomber” but by the mainstream media as merely a “former Weather Underground member”). But I view Obama’s transgressions through the lens of his amplification of Bush’s harmful government interventions, including reckless spending, excessive foreign policy, and severe infringements on civil liberties.
Wouldn’t it have made more sense to argue that Obama hated America and wanted to destroy it four years ago? It cannot be anything but fear-mongering to pretend that four more years of Obama will lead to the apocalypse when the first four have not. Obama’s crony-filled regulatory-happy administration hasn’t been helping the economy, but it is getting better in spite of that, and much of Obama’s legacy does not look any more “anti-American” than Bush’s.
Among other things, Obama has killed bin Laden, voted to extend tax cuts and enact new ones, presided over a boom in natural gas and a huge reduction in energy imports, and even increased deportations of illegal immigrants – not to mention his enactment of the health insurance mandate, which is (correctly) hated by conservatives now but was a Republican idea from the 90’s and pioneered in Massachusetts by today’s Republican presidential candidate. How does any of that look like the actions of a secret liberal Marxist?
The United States of America may suffer a collapse by 2016, and it very well may happen under Obama’s watch. But I think it would be caused by an unsustainable level of debt, not because our President gets rid of too many nuclear warheads and surrenders to the “United States of Islam.” (And if you think Romney and Ryan’s plans are any better for the deficit, you haven’t been paying attention.) So for now I’ll just keep reading the good economic news while still secretly hoping that this movie musters enough momentum to make mincemeat out of myopic Michael Moore’s muckracking montages and march them to the moon…