Rage Dinesh. Rage!

There’s been a number of Letters to the Editor in my local paper urging folks to see the Dinesh D’Souza film “2016: Obama’s America”, a polemic based on his 2010 book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

I think it’s time to shed another perspective on this.

If you’ve know anything about D’Souza, you know what axe he is inclined to grind. The film is just a puff piece to promote his idea that Obama is this raging radical waiting to forever alter America, if he hasn’t done it already.

For one perspective on this, writer Alan Scherstuhl, in an August 30, 2010 piece on the browardpalmbeach.com website said this -

[In the movie] “Paul Vitz shows up to explain that the father who abandons a boy has a profound influence on the shaping of that boy, an argument that lays bare D'Souza's debased rules of evidence: the fact that Obama senior was never around to radicalize Obama junior only proves that he did radicalize Obama junior. That explains why junior later went on to fulfill the dream of all Kenyan revolutionaries of the 1960s: passing the health care plan Republicans came up with in the '90s.”

Do people see what D’Souza is claiming? Since Obama’s father wasn’t around he, Obama’s father, radicalized Barack his by his absence. What rubbish!

Further Scherstuhl writes “Still, the film is a sleepy dud, a polemic that, like D'Souza himself, is at once both outrageous and deeply boring.”

Even Megan McCain, daughter of Senator John McCain, said this in a telephone interview with D’Souza -

“I found the movie to be provocative. But it also came off as conspiracy theory and paranoia-based. I don’t know if all your arguments connected, and that you were making a lot of assumptions about his past and psychology.” Ouch!

Mark Warren in an article on esquire.com dated August 28, 2012 writes -

“His basic idea is that Obama's cool comportment is but a disciplined cover for a seething rage and determination to, in the course of a single presidency, correct the grievous harm that America has inflicted on the world.”

[Movie Narrator] “Here comes Obama, and he never brings the subject up. He's above it. He's the racial healer.... The fact that he doesn't intimidate you with explicit racial appeals is immensely relieving to whites, because whites go, Oh wow, he allows us to believe that we've gotten beyond all that.... This is Obama's secret weapon.”

“You see what D'Souza did just there? He just told us that the proof for his elaborate Kenyan anti-colonial rage theory is that there is no proof at all. Obama's not even acting black! That's how good he is at this game.”

And finally, Sanjiv Singh in ideas.time.com, August 30, 2012 said this -

“In the final analysis “anti-colonial” is too far-fetched a metaphor to understand Obama, who if he rages, must do it very privately. D’Souza’s arguments are so over the top and so obviously personal that they even fail to provoke ire. They are simply like sand between the fingers — fleeting and gone without a trace.”

My point is that before people go gaga over this film check out the background of Dinesh D’Souza and you’ll find that he’s not the unassuming gentleman from Mubai that he may appear to be. Think about it.