I felt like I was in a college classrom in some regards. The movie is a very logical progression and deals with much more than I expected. Funny, there are a few cuts that include a real live Alinsky. If nothing else seeing him and watching him speak is unreal. And for those who have ever doubted connecting dots between Hillary and Alinsky the movie is an eye opener. I don't want to ruin the movie for those who have not seen it but Alinsky and Hillary go way back, way before she wrote her thesis on him. Would't be surprised if he and his staff helped write it in fact lol. Check it out, much better than 2016.
Here's a review of this dreck by a guy who actually agrees with DeSouza about Obama, but pans the movie for the absolute pandering to the sheep(see above you). Desouza will be in jail soon. Hopefully he'll have a happy stay.
[h=1]Dinesh D'Souza's 'America' Will Have Some Conservatives Yearning For Michael Moore's[/h] Comment Now
Back in 2010, and amid some of the worst economic times of Barack Obama’s failed presidency, I lunched with an entrepreneur whose signage business was booming both domestically and globally. I asked this person how he thrived despite all the political barriers to growth, and he said “I’m way too smart for Obama, and I’ll always work around him.”
The entrepreneur’s confident response came to mind as I watched Dinesh D’Souza’s latest documentary, America: Imagine the World Without Her. D’Souza properly loves the U.S., as does this writer, but his documentaries (the other was 2016: Obama’s America, released to much fanfare in 2012) pander to the desire among some in the conservative movement to play hapless victim to the all-powerful Barack.
To believe D’Souza and others who are helping define this ascendant strain of victim conservatism, a man they deem aloof, unfocused and not terribly competent has somehow managed in six short years to transform a nation once defined by staggering individual initiative and entrepreneurial abundance into a land of indolent takers. Victimhood has a new red-state address, and Obama must be flattered to know that for being Barack, he’s sapped the vitality of the most productive people on earth. All of this would be scary if D’Souza’s documentary were at all grounded in reality.
Importantly, none of what’s being written here is meant to defend Obama’s presidency. He’s truly unequal to the office he holds, and any reasonable retrospective on his presidency will read very negatively. Slow economic growth for lengthy periods is no accident, and Obama deserves a lot of the blame. Indeed, putting aside tax increases, naïve attempts to re-regulate finance, his mimic of his predecessor’s weak dollar policies, not to mention his failed stab at creating a healthcare market out of thin air, Obama’s economy has been troubled precisely because this most self-assured of men laughably presumed that he could fix it upon arrival at the White House. Economic growth is easy, and if Obama had just played golf for six years the economy would presently be booming. People tend to prosper when left alone.
Back to the documentary, if at all like me, viewers will at first wonder if they’re in the right theater at the multiplex. Expecting a documentary, the viewer is first subjected to a nails-on-the-chalkboard trip back in time to actors playing Revolutionary War soldiers. George Washington is the featured character, and in the sketch Washington is shot and killed; D’Souza’s point being that we’d logically not be the U.S. today if the war had felled Washington. This is scary stuff for sure, but these movie bits within the documentary come off as downright strange. At one point D’Souza himself joins the fun as a fast food cashier in a way that will redden the face of the squirming viewer. Comedy is hard, even for people who are probably funny in person. To thine own self be true, or something like that.
But thinking about the great George Washington, it could be argued even there that D’Souza misfired for reasons beyond his vandalism of the film medium. While much wiser minds can debate the good or bad of Obama’s less muscular approach to foreign policy, we can’t ignore Washington’s blunt assertion that “It is our foreign policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” The latter looms large simply because in 2016, D’Souza predicted a United States of Islam in a second Obama term. Time will tell on the prediction, but at the very least it should be said that whatever he might think of Obama’s foreign policies were he around today, Washington would at the very least be equally horrified at the size and global scope of the U.S. military; its reach something that D’Souza fairly explicitly endorses.
D’Souza’s other two predictions in 2016, both repeated in America to presumably reveal his prescience, were that the federal government would grow bigger and that the national debt would set records assuming Obama’s re-election. Regarding the first prediction, that’s the equivalent of predicting that the Harlem Globetrotters will beat the Washington Generals. The Globetrotters always win, and politicians always spend. This is true no matter the Party in control of Congress and the federal purse. Government always grows. Period.
As for the national debt, back when Ronald Reagan was president, his supporters quite properly pointed out that as Congress allocates federal funds (Presidents lost the power to even “impound” congressional appropriations in 1974), to blame Reagan for increased spending and deficits was to ignore the Constitution itself. A Congress controlled throughout Reagan’s presidency by Democrats regularly tagged many aspects of his budget recommendations DOA.
So with Reagan’s inability to control the wasteful ways of Democrats in mind, it’s the Republican Party that has enjoyed power over the federal purse since 2011, after the electorate heavily disciplined Obama and the Democrats in the 2010 elections. In that case, wouldn’t a fair and balanced D’Souza at least have pointed out the Party controlling spending since 2016 came out? Not very likely, but if the Democrats could dismiss Reagan’s relative parsimony in the ‘80s, couldn’t Republicans decry Obama’s carelessness with the money of others on the way to greatly reduced spending? America doesn’t say.
Giving D’Souza the benefit of the doubt, it’s no insight to say he made America with the conservative converted wholly in mind. Fair enough, but the argument against Obama is a winner no matter what, so why be so misleading?
Indeed, early in the documentary there’s a replay of Obama’s obnoxious “You didn’t build that” slur. Without excusing the President’s adolescent observation for even a second, to watch America is to believe that “You didn’t build that” describes what the U.S. has become under our redistributionist president. But that would be untrue. As evidenced by the fact that Obama never uttered those words again, not to mention that his handlers worked feverishly to walk back a statement that threatened his campaign, it’s very apparent that the electorate very much believes you certainly did build that.
And while President Obama very mistakenly signed a tax rate increase on income and capital gains into law at the end of 2012 (the last real legislation of his presidency, and markets obviously love that it was), what can’t be forgotten is that the man behind “You didn’t build that” extended the 2003 Bush tax cuts through 2012. While D’Souza’s film would have the blindly partisan thinking the U.S. has gone the way of France, Obama’s actions speak to someone well aware that the electorate would never countenance a return to the nosebleed rates of taxation that prevailed until Reagan happily entered the White House.
D’Souza goes on to narrate that “You didn’t build that” is what created President Obama. No, it did not. What created Obama was a Republican Party that went sickeningly off track in the 2000s. The Republicans lost big in 2008 because the former Party of Growth and entrepreneurial capitalism in the ‘80s had by the 2000s morphed into something quite different. Lest we forget, it was President Bush who signed the business-suffocating Sarbanes-Oxley law (at the time he bragged it was the toughest anti-business “crime” law since the days of FDR), a McCain-Feingold bill that restricted free speech, and with a Republican Congress largely in control of the purse, it was Bush who never vetoed obnoxiously large budgets, not to mention his signing of a rather expensive prescription drug benefit.
It was also Bush who foisted on us a brutally cruel economic “blessing” in the form of Ben Bernanke, imposed tariffs on steel, shrimp and softwood lumber all the while bashing China, promoted with great gusto an economy-crushing devaluation of the dollar that authored an economy-strangling rush into the consumption of housing, and then when the markets revealed the horrors of Bush’s policies with bank failures, rather than allow the capitalist system to fix his myriad errors, Bush, working with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Bernanke, decided to blame the markets for not working right such that they bailed out banks that the free markets had decided were not worth saving. In committing their egregious bailout errors Bush, Bernanke and Paulson engineered a wholly unnecessary “financial crisis” that had nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with them running away from it. And in blocking the infinite and very curative wonders of the marketplace, they robbed our economy of a substantial recovery.
We don’t suffer a presidency today that is admittedly an affront to good governance because Obama profoundly altered the electorate, rather we have a lousy president because the Republicans proved in the 2000s that they could easily match the Democrats when it came to inept policymaking. Until the Republicans realize this and acknowledge just how poorly their own party governed while in control, they won’t be credible. Sadly, D’Souza’s documentary is completely silent about GOP errors that gifted us with Obama in the first place.
D’Souza’s America is noble in its effort to discredit myths about the U.S. as a genocidal, thieving, racist, capitalistically rapacious nation, but really, who believes this? It’s popular in the victimized portion of the conservative movement to assert that those who love the U.S., freedom, and the prosperity it delivers do so in silence out of fear that the majority haters will persecute them for having those views, but let’s be serious. This extreme kind of thinking is all too rare as we all well know. If it weren’t, would a U.S.-despising electorate have voted in Reagan twice by landslide, given Reagan a third term with Bush ’41, a fourth term (liberal historian Richard Reeves has said that Bill Clinton’s presidency was a continuation of Reagan’s) with Clinton, along with two terms for George W. Bush? Knowing the voting patterns of the electorate, is it remotely credible to suggest that Obama has once again transformed how we think in six years?
Unfortunately, this is what D’Souza would have us believe. But in trying to make us think what is observably false, he paints a picture of the U.S. that would be foreign to just about any one of us, including Americans who live in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Boston. Quick, how many of you readers have heard of Howard Zinn? If you’ve heard of him, how many of you have read the late historian’s “A People’s History of the United States”? D’Souza’s America would have us believe that Zinn’s (according to D’Souza he’s the most read historian of the last 50 years) fabulist telling of our allegedly sordid history is accepted as fact in Obama’s America. Really? In truth, Americans probably know Zinn’s negative history about as well as they know Paul Johnson’s more positive account of this great country; as in not very well.
Presumably trying to show viewers just how bad it’s gotten on the college campus, D’Souza interviews noted America hater Ward Churchill (professor at Colorado-Boulder) who, when asked, says it would be justifiable to drop a bomb on the U.S. for all of its alleged global misdeeds. Ok, Churchill is nuts, but is he representative of college professors in a broad sense? Assuming yes to the latter, what’s apparent is that those who attend these universities largely tune the Churchills of the world out as is. College students are not representative of their professors when it comes to ideology.
If this is doubted, we need only refer to arguably the most famous hotbed of campus liberalism, UC Berkeley. Figure blame-America style radicalism achieved full flower there in the ‘60s, but as historian Steven F. Hayward pointed out in the first of his two spectacular The Age of Reagan books, at Berkeley in the ‘60s “genuinely radical students were but a tiny minority of the total student body – 5 percent at the very most – but they enjoyed the advantage of the publicity that accrues to the most extreme position and the loudest bullhorn.” D’Souza’s purpose seems to be one of inciting fear; fear of Zinn, fear that radicalism is catching fire on campus thanks to professors like Churchill, but the reality, as voting patterns plainly reveal, is that college students either aren’t listening, or they’re listening and they’re not buying what their radical professors are selling.
D’Souza more understandably laments the desire of so many historians to erase the stories of self-made success in history books, but if so, so what. As annual sales of the Forbes 400 reveal quite plainly, Americans love success, it’s what animates them, and rich is what they generally hope to be.
It’s with his treatment of Texas that D’Souza truly goes overboard. Texas is used to allegedly expose Obama’s desire to erase the border between Mexico and the U.S. Who cares that George W. Bush similarly had an enlightened and correct view that immigration is a good thing? To D’Souza, America is not about America as much as it’s about making the Democrats look bad.
Comically he asks a Mexican American if he’ll ever move back to Mexico, to which this individual replies that he “already live
Most comically, at one point D’Souza asks something along the lines of “what happens if we give Texas back to Mexico?” Where does one begin? Apparently D’Souza has little knowledge of the people who reside in Texas. Not only would President Obama never try something so totally outlandish, there’s no way the proud citizens of Texas would ever allow something like this to happen. D’Souza’s discussion of Texas and immigration was ultimately insulting for its condescending, absurd tone.
Arguably the most shameful aspect of America was D’Souza’s handling of the death by suicide of Aaron Swartz. Right or wrong, Swartz in 2011 found himself in trouble with the feds for alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Who knows why Swartz committed suicide, D’Souza surely doesn’t know, but one plausible reason has to do with his legal troubles with the feds. What’s vile here for the purposes of the documentary is that D’Souza briefly describes Swartz, touches on the problems he had with an always overbearing federal government (no mention of the Bush DOJ needlessly putting Arthur Andersen out of business in 2002), and then after telling viewers about Swartz’s suicide, the camera shifts to a picture of the White House as though Swartz’s problems were a function of an overreaching Obama administration. Yes, the aloof, liberty and America-hating Obama found the time to be bothered by an Internet personage whom 99.9% of Americans had never heard of before his death. Notable here is that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was passed in 1986…
Regarding his treatment of NSA spying, while the latter is similarly shameful, D’Souza conveniently leaves out that countless Republicans and conservatives have defended the Obama administration on this matter. Without defending federal spying, the sad reality is that this obnoxious bit of intrusion is supported by way too many on both sides of the ideological divide.
But most dishonest of all was D’Souza’s handling of the bank and car bailouts. To watch America is to believe that they too were Obama’s idea, that conservatives and Republicans watched in purist horror as this Saul Alinksy-ite propped up banks well in bed with his government. In truth, it was his Republican predecessor George W. Bush who, when certain banks started to crater in 2008, said:
“I’m a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention. I believe companies that make bad decisions should be allowed to go out of business. Under normal circumstances, I would have followed this course. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of confidence, and major sectors of America’s financial system are at risk of shutting down.”
And then it was Bush appointee Ben Bernanke who begged for the bank bailouts; gravely telling Nancy Pelosi that “I spent my career as an academic studying great depressions. I can tell you from history that if we don’t act in a big way, you can expect another great depression, and this time it is going to be far, far worse.” After that, it was Bush’s Treasury secretary Hank Paulson who fairly explicitly told healthy banks to either take TARP money, or expect a call from regulators the following day on the way to being shut down.
To take America remotely seriously is to believe Obama so skillful and persuasive that he can act as Dictator, as opposed to a constitutionally limited president who hasn’t signed any substantial legislation since 2012, and who won’t for the rest of his presidency unless it’s legislation the Republicans desire. Republican politicians should be offended, as should Democrats across the aisle. According to America, both sides lie prostrate as Obama steamrolls them.
On the other hand, viewers should be offended simply because what is promoted as a serious documentary about the problems in this country is so silly, not to mention plainly dishonest. America is presumably doing well in the red states, but to watch it one can only conclude that D’Souza is full of contempt for those to whom he hopes to sell tickets. How else could one explain a documentary that is so often condescending, and for its major omissions, explicit in its belief that its watchers are too dim and partisan to handle the actual truth? It’s hard to imagine that even D’Souza likes what he’s created.
None of this is meant to deny Obama’s obvious weaknesses as Commander-in-Chief, but it’s precisely because he’s been such a failure that he won’t be able to do much more in the way of damage. Obama’s presidency ended in 2012, and market indices as mentioned reflect just that.
More important, Obama’s presidency deserves rebuke much like Bush’s before it, but in falsely billing America as a serious documentary, a once serious D’Souza has turned what should be a sober analysis of Obama’s failed presidency into a joke. Oddly, some on the right are throwing bouquets in D’Souza’s direction for “exposing” President Obama, but in truth they should be shaming the newly-fashioned documentarian. Freedom works, policies of freedom work, and this debate could and should be won with real ideas; including some within America that were sadly drowned by the documentary’s overall absurdity.
Conservatives deserve better, and D’Souza could surely do better. Logic dictates that serious people should laugh at D’Souza’s latest offering, but the problem there is that what’s comically bad isn’t very funny. Michael Moore’s documentaries are full of holes as America is, but at least Moore is funny. Something tells me a lot of conservatives will oddly find themselves yearning for Moore if they’re unlucky enough to sit through America.
One thing is for sure, Akrard and Gtard will never go see the movie and expose themselves to anything that would disturb their point of view. Here is a pretty good review of the movie:
Opinion
[h=1]‘America’ The Movie And The End Of The Negative Narrative[/h]12:20 PM 07/18/2014
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Robert Orlando
Screenwriter
Someone once said that a one-sided story is simply propaganda. The same is true for the historical narrative of the United States that has been de rigeur among the academic set for the past half century. Until Dinesh D’Souza’s recent film, “America” ($8.2 million at the box office), one side — a negative one — has gone largely unchallenged since the radical movements that swept university campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. The proof of how lost the positive American story has become can be detected in the reviewers’ coverage. By and large, these cranky chroniclers dismiss the film as “right wing,” “off the wall,” or “a doc to mock,” etc.
From a technical or stylistic perspective, the critics have stated that the film has it’s cinematic moments, although one dismissed it as a glorified “power point” presentation, and another accused D’Souza of “doing Michael Moore in reverse.” Yet almost all miss the crucial point: “America” represents a positive narrative of America that has been buried, but having resurfaced under D’Souza presentation.
So yes, D’Souza, an Indian emigrant, who experiences his adopted home America as an outsider, has a difficult, Davidian task (in this analogy media is Goliath). That task? Re-introduce the American public to their long-lost country, to recreate a positive narrative for understandingAmerican history. Demonstrate to the nation that the “blame-America-first” arguments, when put into historical context, don’t hold water.
As I witnessed this adept rewinding of American history at the LA premiere of the movie, I came away with at least 5 historical points that for many Americans might expose the emperor as, if not naked, rather scantily-clad:
What other culture — past or present — can stand this level of moral scrutiny? Stalinist Russia? We all know the answer. In fact, if America was measured by its imperialism, compared historically to Persia, Rome, or even Britain, we would be doing a poor job. America does not keep the spoils of those conquered, but rather has paid a significant price to rebuild her fallen foes. Germany, Japan, Mogadishu, Iraq, or many other cases, are examples of when the public has clamored for the U.S. to “do something,” but if it is executed imperfectly, off to the woodshed.
Perhaps it could be argued that D’Souza’s “America” does not have all the counter spin needed to fully expose the views promulgated by the dominant side, but it will comfort many to witness that an individual can still break a window of the present day’s fortress of ideology. “America” does just that as it calls out the status quo, one that ironically, in the name of revolution, has become the establishment itself.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/18/a...-end-of-the-negative-narrative/#ixzz38llwYgNp
[h=1]‘America’ The Movie And The End Of The Negative Narrative[/h]12:20 PM 07/18/2014
Share
Tweet 35
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35
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Robert Orlando
Screenwriter
Someone once said that a one-sided story is simply propaganda. The same is true for the historical narrative of the United States that has been de rigeur among the academic set for the past half century. Until Dinesh D’Souza’s recent film, “America” ($8.2 million at the box office), one side — a negative one — has gone largely unchallenged since the radical movements that swept university campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. The proof of how lost the positive American story has become can be detected in the reviewers’ coverage. By and large, these cranky chroniclers dismiss the film as “right wing,” “off the wall,” or “a doc to mock,” etc.
From a technical or stylistic perspective, the critics have stated that the film has it’s cinematic moments, although one dismissed it as a glorified “power point” presentation, and another accused D’Souza of “doing Michael Moore in reverse.” Yet almost all miss the crucial point: “America” represents a positive narrative of America that has been buried, but having resurfaced under D’Souza presentation.
So yes, D’Souza, an Indian emigrant, who experiences his adopted home America as an outsider, has a difficult, Davidian task (in this analogy media is Goliath). That task? Re-introduce the American public to their long-lost country, to recreate a positive narrative for understandingAmerican history. Demonstrate to the nation that the “blame-America-first” arguments, when put into historical context, don’t hold water.
As I witnessed this adept rewinding of American history at the LA premiere of the movie, I came away with at least 5 historical points that for many Americans might expose the emperor as, if not naked, rather scantily-clad:
- Native Americans died not only from colonial genocide, but from disease, as did Europeans when earlier visited by Asian peoples.
- African Americans, while of course the undisputed victims of the atrocities of slavery, also owned a significant percentage of the southern slave plantations.
- The Southwest was not imperialistically invaded by the U.S., but rather as “Texicans” intentionally and enthusiastically seceded from Mexico out of a desire to become Americans.
- Overall wealth creation should neither be demonized nor defined by its abuses, but celebrated for the freedoms of opportunity it has provided to millions around the world.
- Saul Alinsky launched a revolution to bring down America in the very circles that would have influenced both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
What other culture — past or present — can stand this level of moral scrutiny? Stalinist Russia? We all know the answer. In fact, if America was measured by its imperialism, compared historically to Persia, Rome, or even Britain, we would be doing a poor job. America does not keep the spoils of those conquered, but rather has paid a significant price to rebuild her fallen foes. Germany, Japan, Mogadishu, Iraq, or many other cases, are examples of when the public has clamored for the U.S. to “do something,” but if it is executed imperfectly, off to the woodshed.
Perhaps it could be argued that D’Souza’s “America” does not have all the counter spin needed to fully expose the views promulgated by the dominant side, but it will comfort many to witness that an individual can still break a window of the present day’s fortress of ideology. “America” does just that as it calls out the status quo, one that ironically, in the name of revolution, has become the establishment itself.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/18/a...-end-of-the-negative-narrative/#ixzz38llwYgNp
You have to be kidding. First off, have you seen the movie. If not you cannot comment. Secondly, obviously you have not checked into Obama's past and his associates. I am so proud that a legal immigrant who chose to come to America and did it legally has gotten involved in the process. Some times the best persepective is from the outside looking in. Totalitarian mastermind, that would be Obama. The historical aspects of the movie are not true. Well once you have seen the movie why don't you enlighten us with specifics. So far all you have done is shoot an arrow into the sky not even knowing where it will land. The historical aspects are contrary to what the left waves in front of the sheep but it does not stand up to a much broader and inclusive perspective. Anyone who uses a term such as "simply untrue" simply is not interested in the truth. You cannot fan a fire that does not exist. Facts speak for themselves.
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