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D'Souza Can't Quite Accept the Real Obama
American Thinker
Jack Cashill
10/2/2012
Excerpt:
"In 2016: Obama's America, the most successful and artful conservative documentary to date, author and producer Dinesh D'Souza takes a step closer to exposing the real Barack Obama. To get there, however, he will have to remove the obstacles he has set in his own way.
"Obama came out of nowhere," says D'Souza at the film's beginning. "No one really knew him." The reason why no one knew him was simple enough. Obama discouraged the media from looking. The major media obliged, and their conservative counterparts in New York and Washington, fearing ridicule, honored this absurd gentleman's agreement.
D'Souza was one such gentleman. A Dartmouth grad, he shows up regularly on TV talk shows and serves now as president of King's College in New York City. As such, he cannot afford to stray too far from approved paths. In 2016, D'Souza takes a calculated step off that path, and for that I commend him and recommend the film.
"There a lot of mysterious black holes around Obama," D'Souza told Denver radio host Peter Boyles last week.
Although the film is a serious improvement over the book on which it is based, The Roots of Obama's Rage, D'Souza stubbornly refuses to explore some of those holes.
In the book, D'Souza argued that that Barack Obama, Sr. was "first and foremost" an anti-colonialist and that his son was, too. Both assertions are arguably true. What is not true, but what was absolutely essential to D'Souza's thesis, is that Obama inherited the philosophy and its attendant rage from his absent father. The movie, happily, gives us a broader look at Obama's formation, including an expanded role for his grandfather; his mother, Ann Dunham; and his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
Unhappily, the thesis of D'Souza's book and movie rests on a series of false premises. In the book, there is remarkably little talk about Obama's mother, Ann Dunham. The reader sees her only as "Obama Sr.'s first convert" to anti-colonialism. "Obama's mother made sure that her son chose the direction of his biological father," D'Souza writes. "And her preference sunk in."
To make his case, D'Souza tells the reader of Ann's "white-bread upbringing in the Midwest" but fully ignores her adolescent evolution in Seattle into a garden-variety leftist with an anti-American grudge. That she met Obama Sr. in Russian class tells us where Ann was heading even before they met.
In the new introduction to the paperback of Obama's Rage, D'Souza elaborates, "Repeatedly, unceasingly, [Ann] convinced her son that he should develop his father's values and identity in imitation of the senior Obama." According to D'Souza, Obama shares this fact with the reader in both of his books, the acclaimed 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father and the 2006 policy book The Audacity of Hope.
This is simply false. In Audacity, the mother never talks about the father. The closest we get is this: "I knew him only through the letters he sent and the stories my mother and grandparents told." What is more, we learn that the values Ann shared with Obama were not his father's, but those of the American civil rights movement. "Whenever the opportunity presented itself," Obama writes, "she would drill into me the values that she saw there: tolerance, equality, standing up for the disadvantaged."
In the more biographical Dreams, Obama's mother and grandparents try to make the fatherless son proud of his heritage, but the stories they tell are of a bold, flamboyant, larger-than-life African prince, not of an anti-colonialist flamethrower.
Ann had little idea what Obama Sr.'s anti-colonial views may have been. The evidence suggests a relationship between her and Obama Sr. not much deeper than a one-night stand. As is solidly documented, Ann and young Barry showed up in Seattle weeks after Obama's August 1961 birth and lived there for about a year while Obama Sr. remained in Hawaii.
D'Souza cannot yet to come to terms with this. In the movie, he flirts with fraud in his continued insistence that, despite all evidence, Obama Sr. and Ann lived together for a year. Last week on KHOW in Denver, Boyles challenged D'Souza on this issue."
.......................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...eal_obama.html
American Thinker
Jack Cashill
10/2/2012
Excerpt:
"In 2016: Obama's America, the most successful and artful conservative documentary to date, author and producer Dinesh D'Souza takes a step closer to exposing the real Barack Obama. To get there, however, he will have to remove the obstacles he has set in his own way.
"Obama came out of nowhere," says D'Souza at the film's beginning. "No one really knew him." The reason why no one knew him was simple enough. Obama discouraged the media from looking. The major media obliged, and their conservative counterparts in New York and Washington, fearing ridicule, honored this absurd gentleman's agreement.
D'Souza was one such gentleman. A Dartmouth grad, he shows up regularly on TV talk shows and serves now as president of King's College in New York City. As such, he cannot afford to stray too far from approved paths. In 2016, D'Souza takes a calculated step off that path, and for that I commend him and recommend the film.
"There a lot of mysterious black holes around Obama," D'Souza told Denver radio host Peter Boyles last week.
Although the film is a serious improvement over the book on which it is based, The Roots of Obama's Rage, D'Souza stubbornly refuses to explore some of those holes.
In the book, D'Souza argued that that Barack Obama, Sr. was "first and foremost" an anti-colonialist and that his son was, too. Both assertions are arguably true. What is not true, but what was absolutely essential to D'Souza's thesis, is that Obama inherited the philosophy and its attendant rage from his absent father. The movie, happily, gives us a broader look at Obama's formation, including an expanded role for his grandfather; his mother, Ann Dunham; and his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis.
Unhappily, the thesis of D'Souza's book and movie rests on a series of false premises. In the book, there is remarkably little talk about Obama's mother, Ann Dunham. The reader sees her only as "Obama Sr.'s first convert" to anti-colonialism. "Obama's mother made sure that her son chose the direction of his biological father," D'Souza writes. "And her preference sunk in."
To make his case, D'Souza tells the reader of Ann's "white-bread upbringing in the Midwest" but fully ignores her adolescent evolution in Seattle into a garden-variety leftist with an anti-American grudge. That she met Obama Sr. in Russian class tells us where Ann was heading even before they met.
In the new introduction to the paperback of Obama's Rage, D'Souza elaborates, "Repeatedly, unceasingly, [Ann] convinced her son that he should develop his father's values and identity in imitation of the senior Obama." According to D'Souza, Obama shares this fact with the reader in both of his books, the acclaimed 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father and the 2006 policy book The Audacity of Hope.
This is simply false. In Audacity, the mother never talks about the father. The closest we get is this: "I knew him only through the letters he sent and the stories my mother and grandparents told." What is more, we learn that the values Ann shared with Obama were not his father's, but those of the American civil rights movement. "Whenever the opportunity presented itself," Obama writes, "she would drill into me the values that she saw there: tolerance, equality, standing up for the disadvantaged."
In the more biographical Dreams, Obama's mother and grandparents try to make the fatherless son proud of his heritage, but the stories they tell are of a bold, flamboyant, larger-than-life African prince, not of an anti-colonialist flamethrower.
Ann had little idea what Obama Sr.'s anti-colonial views may have been. The evidence suggests a relationship between her and Obama Sr. not much deeper than a one-night stand. As is solidly documented, Ann and young Barry showed up in Seattle weeks after Obama's August 1961 birth and lived there for about a year while Obama Sr. remained in Hawaii.
D'Souza cannot yet to come to terms with this. In the movie, he flirts with fraud in his continued insistence that, despite all evidence, Obama Sr. and Ann lived together for a year. Last week on KHOW in Denver, Boyles challenged D'Souza on this issue."
.......................................
View the complete article at:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...eal_obama.html