Obama 2016: The Movie

    I recently watched Dinesh D'Souza's new documentary, Obama 2016.  I had heard going into it that the film was not a foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theory attack on the president, but rather a fairly evenhanded, though partisan, exploration of the background and influences of Barack Obama.  Having now seen it, I concur.  D'Souza could have made the 9/11 "conspiracy" look like a Ken Burns documentary if he'd been so inclined - some of the material is quite shocking.  But his sources are widely available and easily verifiable.
    Much of the movie is narrated by Obama himself through the audio version of his book, Dreams From My Father.  The 2008 campaign will go down in history as one of the great abdications of responsibility of not just the press and the Republican party, but of us the American people.  The refusal to read and take seriously Obama's own explication of his world view was inexcusable.  One can reject the idea that a person's upbringing, parents, mentors, associations, friends, professors, religious leaders, and even his writings do not define who he becomes, but to do so is to turn a blind eye to history and relegate the entire genre of biography and autobiography to "entertainment."  If politics is the arena of ideas, then who a politician trained under and what his program of training consisted of is highly relevant.
    Towards the close of the film, D'Souza says: “The first time we didn’t know Barack Obama: now we do.”  Certainly much of what we know now is due to observation of the president while he's been in office.  But D'Souza's film adeptly fills in some of the gaps and provides indispensable context.  Whatever your current view of Barack Obama, I highly recommend it.