Just came back from seeing "Obama 2016" What did you guys think?

It doesn’t seem like many of his facts are correct, and much is based on wild speculation and implausible psychoanalysis: FACT CHECK: ‘Anti-colonial’ Obama not plausible

We went last week to see the move, @majorrich. The showing we planned on seeing was sold out. We bought tickets to the following show. By the time the movie started, this showing was also sold out. I have read Obama’s books, the books of his mentors and I honestly already knew the vast majority of the points made in the movie. It was interesting to see the interview with Obama’s brother though.

D’Souza did an excellent job. You’ll never be able to change the minds of his followers though. That is the strangest part of this to me.

From a complete outsider’s perspective, who hasn’t seen the movie but has (loosely) followed the last four years, i would say you’re pretty much fucked.

Obama has basically proven to be a supporter of the bush doctrine, only a much more literate and capable one, and managed not to fulfill many of the promises he made regarding security vs privacy matters while going relatively unquestioned.

Romney, on the other side, is a fraudolent money grubbing asshole of a lunatic who has picked as VP a man who has the balls to say the solution to the economic crisis is cutting taxes to the same assholes who caused it in the first place (instead of putting them all to the wall, like good old Josef would do).

So yeah, your choices are basically between a well read and intelligent fascist, or a thief convinced that his magic underpants protect him from any harm, hypothesis which someone really should test.

I have not seen the movie. I hasn’t played in my little town.

The strangest part to me is that Obama’s opposition will not read the facts as checked in simple short articles such as @BhacSsylan linked.

Obama’s father left when the boy was 2 years old, and then they met only once when the boy was 10. They did not correspond. They did not talk regularly on the phone. They did not interact, but there’s supposed to be some magical intellectual connection between the two. Hogwash.

The movie is neither well-researched nor thought out from the reports I’ve read about it.

@Thammuz : What Bush doctrines has Obama supported? He ended the war in Iraq just as he said he would. “Good old Josef”? Are you saying we need Stalin to fix problems? You are slinging mud, and you don’t seem to have a very clear grasp of how the decentralized US government system works.

@Hawaii_Jake I remember the National Defense Authorization Act passed with a wording that allowed incarceration of citizens without due process (This coming from the ACLU) which seems like a “patriot act on steroids” to me, plus i remember him promising to close down the base in Guantanamo, which he hasn’t done.

Then again, I follow these things the same way you would follow italian politics. I.E. i hear a lot, i build up an opinion, i don’t remember the details.

Also, SOPA and PIPA, but those were not coming directly from him so i don’t count them.

Also, and i feel silly having to point this out, but it seems to be a needed clarification, the Stalin thing was a joke. More precisely, a deliberate exaggeration of the right measure, which would be fining them and actually punishing them for fucking around with the western world’s economy.

Also, I slinged mud well into both trenches, or did you miss me calling Romney a thief and a lunatic?

@Thammuz : I wrote poorly. I understood you were slinging mud on both sides. I object to your assertion that both candidates are equally unpalatable. There is a clear difference between the platforms of the 2 parties, but this question is not about that.

This question is about a partisan movie weaving fact and fiction to sway the minds of voters. I doubt it will have much impact on the electorate.

@Hawaii_Jake, I personally think that the people who have made this a record setting movie are people who don’t like Obama’s politics. I doubt many of his supporters will pay to see the movie. Just MHO.

@Hawaii_Jake From an outside perspective, again. Seems to me that very little can change the american electorate’s mind as long as it isn’t fiction, mudslinging and/or sexual in nature.

@bkcunningham I dunno, in a similar situation, i would go see a movie against my favourite candidate if i had the time. To have a laugh, if nothing else.

Not seen it, but I have seen some 9/11 inside job videos. They are probably better researched.

My quotes aren’t working, so I’m just going to post the huffington Post fact check article on this fine piece of propaganda:

WASHINGTON — “2016: Obama’s America,” a new conservative film exploring the roots of President Barack Obama’s political views, took in $6.2 million to make it one of the highest-grossing movies of last weekend. The film, written and narrated by conservative scholar Dinesh D’Souza, argues that Obama was heavily influenced by what D’Souza calls the “anti-colonial” beliefs of his father, Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan academic who was largely absent from the president’s life.

To document that claim, D’Souza travels to Kenya to interview members of Obama’s extended family as well as to Hawaii and Indonesia, where Obama grew up. He also cites several actions and policy positions Obama has taken to support the thesis that Obama is ideologically rooted in the Third World and harbors contempt for the country that elected him its first black president.

The assertion that Obama’s presidency is an expression of his father’s political beliefs, which D’Souza first made in 2010 in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” is almost entirely subjective and a logical stretch at best.

It’s true that Obama’s father lived most of his life in Kenya, an African nation once colonized by the British, and that Obama’s reverence for his absent father frames his best-selling memoir. D’Souza even sees clues in the book’s title: “Notice it says `Dreams From My Father,’ not `of’ my father,” D’Souza says.

But it’s difficult to see how Obama’s political leanings could have been so directly shaped by his father, as D’Souza claims. The elder Obama left his wife and young son, the future president, when Obama was 2 and visited his son only once, when Obama was 10. But D’Souza portrays that loss as an event that reinforced rather than weakened the president’s ties to his father, who died in an automobile accident when Obama was in college.

D’Souza interviews Paul Vitz, a New York University psychologist who has studied the impact of absent fathers on children. In Obama’s case, Vitz says, the abandonment meant “he has the tension between the Americanism and his Africanism. He himself is an intersection of major political forces in his own psychology.”

From there, the evidence D’Souza uses to support his assertion starts to grow thin.

D’Souza says Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, shared his father’s left-leaning views. After living in Indonesia for several years, D’Souza said, Dunham sent the younger Obama to live with his grandparents in Hawaii so he would not be influenced by her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian who worked for American oil companies and fought communists as a member of the Indonesian army.

“Ann separates Barry from Lolo’s growing pro-Western influence,” D’Souza says in the film. Obama has said his mother had sent him back to Hawaii so he would be educated in the United States.

In Hawaii, D’Souza asserts with no evidence that Obama sympathized with native Hawaiians who felt they had been marginalized by the American government when Hawaii was becoming a state. D’Souza also asserts – again with no evidence – that Obama had been coached to hold those views at Punahou, the prestigious prep school he attended.

“Oppression studies, if you will. Obama got plenty of that when he was here in Punahou,” D’Souza says, standing on the campus in Honolulu.

In Kenya, D’Souza interviews Philip Ochieng, a lifelong friend of the president’s father, who claims the elder Obama was “totally anti-colonial.” Ochieng also discloses some of his own political views, complaining about U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq and saying the U.S. refuses to “tame” Israel, which he calls a “Trojan horse in the Middle East.” D’Souza seems to suggest that if a onetime friend of Obama’s late father holds those opinions, so, too, must the president himself.

D’Souza then goes through a list of actions Obama has taken as president to support his thesis. Many of them don’t hold water:

_ D’Souza rightly argues that the national debt has risen to $16 trillion under Obama. But he never mentions the explosion of debt that occurred under Obama’s predecessor, Republican George W. Bush, nor the 2008 global financial crisis that provoked a shock to the U.S. economy.

_ D’Souza says Obama is “weirdly sympathetic to Muslim jihadists” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He does not mention that Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and the drone strikes that have killed dozens of other terrorists in the region.

_D’Souza wrongly claims that Obama wants to return control of the Falkland Islands from Britain to Argentina. The U.S. refused in April to endorse a final declaration on Argentina’s claim to the islands at the Summit of the Americas, provoking criticism from other Latin American nations.

_D’Souza says Obama has “done nothing” to impede Iran’s nuclear ambitions, despite the severe trade and economic sanctions his administration has imposed on that country to halt its suspected nuclear program. Obama opposes a near-term military strike on Iran, either by the U.S. or Israel, although he says the U.S. will never tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran.

_ D’Souza says Obama removed a bust of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the Oval Office because Churchill represented British colonialism. White House curator William Allman said the bust, which had been on loan, was already scheduled to be returned before Obama took office. Another bust of Churchill is on display in the president’s private residence, the White House says.

@Espiritus_Corvus, you just reposted the first response on this thread.

Oooops. My bad.

That is okay. I wasn’t being a smarta@@. Just making note that the point was made. :~)

I think the real question is, what if it happens to be accurate?

What’s wrong with being anti-colonial ? Colonialism is so 19th century.
Look at what a f’d up mess the colonial influence of the U.S. has had in central America in the name of the ‘drug war’. It has bought the U.S. little except access to good supply lines for fruit.

It’s a right wing hack job. Obama was influenced by his father, who left him when he was just 2 years old. To believe such nonsense, you have to believe that toddlers run around with fully formed political agendas. Rubbish. And furthermore, is it a big problem to be anti-colonialist. Are our far-right friends suggesting that a new round of American Colonialism is just what we need. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t nearly enough. We need to invade, judging form Romney and McCain’s speeches, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Russia at the very least. All must be made permanent American colonies. And we need to move back into Iraq and well as staying forever in Afghanistan; making them colonial possessions of the American right wrong as well. No thank you.

You know the world is going to hell in a hand basket when the Liberals out no# the Conservatives. Sad!

So far, besides the OP, I think I’m the only one who has seen the movie.

I don’t plan on it anyway. I think the “name calling” has gotten out of hand, and D’Souza is to conservative for me, anyway! At best I probably would try to argue with the screen softly. At worst, i would argue loudly!

Ok, he’s actually too conservative for me. Another time when editing is best done before you hit answer!

The liars that call themselves conservatives today are really Radical Reactionaries. I’m a conservative, and I am NOTHING like those who want to tear down all existing social institutions ans yank us back into the 1800s of worse.

@ETpro You’re a conservative? we’ve never disagreed as far as i can remember, how’s that possible?

@Thammuz I’m a conservative because I fit the dictionary definition of the word. I prefer tried-and-true solutions to problems so long as such a solution exists. I want to preserve the existing social institutions in my home country and internationally. I favor fiscal responsibility, which does not mean gutting investment in the future to give enormous tax breaks to billionaires. It means using a progressive tax system like we have done since the beginning of the 20th century up to the advent of Voodoo Economics to fully fund the government we need.

@ETpro you are about as Conservative as Dan Rather. C’mon quit fooling yourself and everyone else here, you are liberal in the league with Eleanor Roosevelt, and Obama.

I think @ETpro raises an interesting point that from an objective perspective the political spectrum in the US is such that Democrats have become conservatives and republicans reactionary. I tend to agree with him.

@majorrich What @whitenoise says is exactly true and it is why, by the dictionary definition, I am a conservative and those who think I am a liberal are really reactionaries.

Of course, it you refuse to believe the dictionary and insist on making up your own meanings for words so the fit your political bias, commiseration becomes difficult to impossible.