Documentary Review: Dinesh D'Souza Unsuccessfully Reaches With 2016

While in college one of my good friends had a basic, American sounding name something like (name is changed to avoid embarrassing the real person) Charlie Palmer. Charlie had a father who was born and raised in Memphis, and who had a southern accent, and then his mother was of Colombian descent. Charlie would talk about his Colombian heritage on occasion, but it in no obvious way defined him.

Fast forward roughly five years, Charlie has drifted from his friends as college friends often do after graduation, yet somehow I heard that he was a first year law student at a Midwestern university. The only difference was that formerly all American, fraternity party attending Charlie Palmer was now Charles Palmer-Gonzalez, a foreign law student in a strange land mingling solely with other students who’d matriculated from around the world. I knew this because a close friend of mine was in Charlie’s class.

I was reminded of Palmer’s evolution while watching Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary on President Obama, 2016. D’Souza arrived at Dartmouth in the late ‘70s, and soon joined a foreign students’ association that included not a few Americans utterly fascinated by and eager to spend time with their fellow classmates from foreign locales.

As the above applies to Obama, it’s impossible to know for certain, but my own guess is that having had a very American upbringing in 1970s Hawaii (parents who weren’t terribly interested in him a truism of the “Me Decade”), Obama by the college and law school years realized that it would be advantageous to play up his foreign background which included a Kenyan father who abandoned him not long after he was born, and a mother who took him to live with her in Indonesia until the 5th grade,

The author, John Tamny, is not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination (his many articles in the past show that he is LIBERTARIAN and quite sympathetic to Milton Friedman’s ideas ).

After seeing the documentary, Tamny just believes that D’Souza is stretching things too much and force fitting the evidence to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

According to Tamny, D’Souza’s biggest reach in a documentary full of them, is D’Souza’s attempt to draw a picture of sameness between himself and the president. Born the same year, graduated from an Ivy League school the same year, married the same year, similar skin color, and similar backgrounds in the sense that both had ancestors who grew up under colonialism. D’Souza, in drawing the similarities, seems to be asking why he and the president see the world so differently.

The problem is that Obama and D’Souza aren’t so similar. Yes, D’Souza’s Indian ancestors lived under British rule until the bloody partition in 1947, and then Obama’s father grew up in a Kenya that similarly emerged from British rule in the ‘50s. But that’s where the similarities seem to end. D’Souza grew up in Bombay until he left for Dartmouth in the late ‘70s, while Obama, notwithstanding efforts from his detractors meant to make him foreign, mostly grew up in Honolulu while attending Punahou, a nationally known and very elite school.

In short, Obama’s upbringing was mostly American. He only saw his father once after he was a year old, and then his mother as mentioned sent him back to live with his grandparents when he was in the 5th grade. In fact, Obama had a very middle class and very “white” upbringing by grandparents who seemingly cared for him in ways that his parents never did. As D’Souza doubtless knows from his days at Dartmouth, it’s very much the norm for left leaning students to emerge from the high schools of the elite, so it’s odd that he would feign surprise about the views of our president.

Of course eager to promote a thesis about what shaped Obama, D’Souza argues throughout 2016 that Obama’s African lineage explains him. He presumes that the worldview of a father whom he barely knew informs Obama’s today, and while it’s possible that he took his mother’s laudatory comments about his father to heart, and while genes are certainly powerful, Obama strikes Tamny as yet another utopian, adult-adolescent liberal of the American variety; his views commonplace within the Democratic party that he leads.

THAT’s ALL.

I don’t see in Tamny’s comments, anything that is sympathetic to liberals at all.

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