[There is additional content here. I accidentally published this days ago while I was still working on it. So if you've seen this article before, you really haven't. There is more. Lots more! Happy reading!]
Four years ago, I took down Dinesh D'Souza with my review of his god-awful movie, '2016: Obama's America.' In it, D'Souza hashed together a laughable conspiracy theory regarding Barack Obama's background and intentions. I hated watching it, but I felt it my duty to take one for the team, and then report on it.
Well, one presidential election cycle later, he's back at it. So again, I felt it my duty to go see his latest fantasy film (since I can't call it a "documentary"). Again, I hated almost every minute of it. But I am loyal to my seven readers, and see no reason why you should have to suffer as I did in order to stay informed about what the opposition is saying. Yes, I traveled out to the only theater showing the film locally, way out in Delafield, WI, and there I subjected myself to this foreigner's idiotic bile for a full hour and forty minutes.
This is how much I love you people.
The lies begin before Dinesh even speaks, showing a "disclaimer" reading, "This is a true story. No names were changed to protect the Democratic Party." So right there, you know the kind of fact-free journalism you are about to be exposed to. But then the film veers off on a tangent, which is D'Sousa's usual M.O., detailing his own anecdotal experiences. Except that this time, they are quite fascinating! Because D'Sousa was convicted in 2014 of illegally donating $20,000 to the New York Senate campaign of Wendy Long. His conviction, and his time in jail, marks the opening backdrop to his story.
It's an odd opening, because seldom does a narrator step into scene 1 and say, "I'm a convicted felon. Please take my opinion seriously." But perhaps that is yet another indicator on how wacky this whole election season has been.
D'Souza blames his conviction on persecution by the Obama administration. He claims his earlier movie, which attacked the 44th president, was the reason he was singled out and persecuted for a relatively small crime. He states, "If you make a film attacking the most powerful man in the world, expect the empire to strike back."
The fact that he has no evidence for this doesn't seem to bother him. He also leaves out the crucial detail that he plead guilty to the charges. One cannot claim to be an innocent victim and plead guilty at the same time. His lawyer is shown, in what I can only assume is a re-creation of stock footage (because it looks too crisp), arguing that if it was someone other than Dinesh D'Souza there would be no trial. The judge angrily (and rightly) counters that such an argument is baseless, and finds him guilty. It's the right call, and the judge gives a balanced view, justifiably indignant that D'Souza would dare play at a political persecution defense. Dinesh is then seen being led away. His next scenes show him in jail, or what we are meant to think of as jail, having to endure the rough company of heavily muscled criminals, gang members and thieves. When he asks his fellow inmates what they're in for, they respond with answers like, "manslaughter," or "I got into a bar fight." One man tells Dinesh that he set someone on fire - and has a demonic gleam in his eye when he says so! (It plays far too well to the camera to be believable.) When these hardened thugs ask D'Souza what he's in for, he says, "I gave too much money to a friend of mine who was running for election," the other inmates, naturally, laugh at him.
But there are several problems with this depiction. For starters, it never happened that way.
D'Souza was never sentenced to actual prison. He was sentenced in May of 2014 to eight months in a halfway house, five years of probation, an hour each week of community service, and psychological counseling. Being in a halfway house must have been traumatic enough for a conservative geek like D'Souza, and some halfway houses are indeed a little like jails, but this was no high-security facility. Dinesh is seen reading all the books he wants, brought through the security check-point with little examination. Maybe it wasn't a country club federal prison, but it was room and board with little danger. His conversations with hardened criminals were probably not with murderers. Most of them were likely petty drug offenders. Maybe there were a few pre-parolees inside who were hard-core thugs, but they would be passing through, unwilling to risk their soon-to-be parole.
Dinesh got off light, and he knew it.
If Barack Obama wanted to target D'Souza for persecution, why give him a halfway house with community service and probation? And since he was given a slap on the wrist, what gall does Dinesh have to play the victim card?
As part of D'Souza's punishment, he is made to undergo psychological counseling. In his own words, Obama wanted to "deprogram" him. If that were actually the goal, then it didn't work so well, did it? And if that were Obama's goal, he surely would have better tools at his disposal, would he not?
This makes little difference to Dinesh, who then proceeds to thoroughly debunk his own claim by talking about what he did for his weekly community service, namely, teaching English to immigrants applying to become U.S. citizens.
Why, oh why, would anyone who seriously wanted to "deprogram" a political enemy grant him access to legal immigrants - in a classroom? Even D'Souza admits that it seems like a strange punishment.
Convicted of illegal campaign donations in a post-Citizens'-United-ruling political landscape? Jesus Fucking Christ, how stupid do you have to be to get caught for that one! When millions and even billions of dollars gets thrown into superpacs with no legal blowback whatsoever, how can you be so incredibly dumb as to get caught for only $20 grand? It's like getting convicted for marijuana dealing in Colorado! D'Souza even admits, as his fellow inmates laugh at him, that he feels like a pretty stupid criminal.
That, of course, is because he is stupid.
One of the more egregious falsehoods is shown during his halfway house scenes. Dinesh is depicted watching the news during his confinement. Hillary Clinton announces her candidacy for president, and the criminals, mostly black with a few Latinos mixed in, all applaud.
This is flat-out bullshit! Dinesh tells a bald-faced lie which can be proven with an examination of the timeline. D'Sousa was convicted in May of 2014. His eight months of time in the halfway house would have expired in January or February of 2015. Hillary did not officially declare her candidacy until April of 2015, meaning that Dinesh could not have been in his halfway house! He was walking free when Hillary made her announcement. And, the announcement wasn't made on the news, if you recall. It was done online! His depiction of criminals applauding Hillary making her announcement on CNN is a complete fabrication!
At this point, D'Souza has lost all credibility. And we're just getting started.
Dinesh is astounded at how thoroughly the Democratic party has infused the prison population he meets. In fact, he's amazed at how thoroughly it has cornered the market on the minority vote in general. He meets and befriends one chess-playing inmate who describes to him his crime, which involved an insurance con whereby he and a few other thugs would sell insurance to poor and/or elderly souls. Then, these people would "mysteriously" die, and the "sellers" would bilk the insurance payout. In an act of hubris I've seldom seen even from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh looks at the camera and makes a thoughtful look as his narrated voice asks, "Where have I heard about something like this before?"
Of course, we're all meant to realize he's talking about Obamacare. It's an accusation every bit as devoid of truth as it is of substance. The "death panels" accusation regarding the ACA has long been debunked, and the fact that some form of it resurfaces in this film, even in a watered-down and metaphorical form, is truly disgusting.
Dinesh leaves the halfway house determined to get to the bottom of the Democratic Party brand, it's history, and how it relates to minority voters. He wants to know why Hillary has such sway over the black vote.
"I was right about Obama," he says. "Now I have to find out about Hillary."
Oh, no you don't, you son of a bitch! You won't get away with that one! You were not right about Obama! Let's take a good, long look at what you really said!
Early in the film, Dinesh says that he predicted three things about Barack Obama: that he would 1) weaken America's allies and strengthen America's enemies, 2) that he would double the nation's debt, and 3) allow Islam to rise up into a new Caliphate with designs on dominating the world.
No, not quite, Dinesh.
What he actually said in '2016' was that Obama would try to raise up other nations by weakening America. D'Souza likened this to a story from Obama's book, 'Dreams From My Father,' in which he saw greater roles for Kenya and other third-world nations, and saw American influence as an enemy. I criticized this in my 2012 blog post as accusing Obama of trying to make the world taller by cutting off his own feet at the ankles. I was right. Dinesh's retro-diction is wrong. Strike one.
Dinesh never said that the nation's debt would be doubled by Obama. What he specifically said was that Obama would use debt as a weapon. He said that by ensuring that America had less, other nations would be ensured of having more. But that's not what Obama did. Although the debt did double, it would have quadroupled or octoupled under Bush's rate of spending. Obama reigned it in, bringing America's deficit levels down to nearly nothing. No, we aren't drawing a surplus yet, but we soon will, and that's a credit to Obama's fiscal responsibility. Since D'Souza never specifically predicted that Obama would "double" the national debt, we must rate this as a non-prophecy. And since he also specifically predicted that Obama would use debt as a weapon, driving the deficit up rather than down, we must rate this as a failed prophecy. Strike two.
Finally, Dinesh did not predict that Obama would help give rise to a new Islamic Caliphate with designs on world domination. He did say something very similar, however. He said that Obama's policies would help to bring about a "United States of Arabia," with designs on global power.
Right. Obama helped bring about ISIS. Then bombed it? Which is it? Is Obama a war hawk who wants to bomb the Middle East, or is he a Muslim who wants to rule it? Conservatives can't seem to make up their minds. And Dinesh can't seem to tell the difference between bombing an Islamic State and helping it. Strike three. He's out!
And let's not forget other failed predictions. For example, that the United States would bring its stockpiles of nuclear weapons down to zero. Or that Obama would help Iran get a nuclear weapon. That's strikes four and five, right there!
As the movie begins its post-incarceration phase, Dinesh decides to visit the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. to pay a visit to what the Democratic Party is all about. Entering, a pretty college girl behind a desk says to him, "Welcome! Are you a registered Democrat?"
"I'm from Mumbai," he replies, as if that were an answer to her question.
"Oh, wonderful!" she says, and then completely abandons her original question to give a practiced pitch for the Democrats, depicting them as the party that is for the rights of the poor and minorities. When Dinesh asks if they've always been this way, she replies, "Oh, yes! Everybody knows that!"
Dinesh begs to differ. On his tour, he sees a prominently displayed portrait of Abraham Lincoln. 'What's he doing here?' he thinks. 'Wasn't Lincoln a Republican? The founder of the Republican party, in fact?'
He then depicts the man he thinks is the true founder of the Democratic Party - Andrew Jackson, our nation's seventh president, and the first president to preside over the newly formed Democratic Party after Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican party split apart.
Andrew Jackson, Dinesh correctly points out, was a slave holder, and a racist. He spends all too much time depicting Jackson's depravities as a man who owned slaves, as if past performance were somehow an indicator of future results. And he bluntly tells his audience about how Jefferson took sexual advantage of his slave women. Then he gives this humdinger of a one-liner: "What is it with Democrats and vulnerable young women?"
We all know damned well who that one was aimed at. Bill Clinton! But Thomas Jefferson also slept with his slaves, most notably Sally Hemings. That doesn't justify things, but it does prove that the misdeed was not solely a Democratic Party trait. Besides, Donald Trump has had three wives and any number of mistresses. D'Souza's movie was likely in its post-production phase before the Trump phenomenon grew out of control. Had he seen that one coming, he might have guarded his tongue! And he is one to talk besides! D'Souza also was once a well-publicized philanderer, taking on a married mistress and getting engaged to her while still being a married man himself! The event caused him to swiftly "resign" from his position as president of King's College in New York.
They that live in glass houses...
Dinesh then spends an inordinate amount of time going through the history of the Democratic Party, pointing out one racist atrocity after another. Now, it's true that the Democratic Party was once very friendly toward slavery, and D'Souza is correct to point this out. But he omits one very critical detail.
The Democratic Party was the conservative party back then!
All the racist atrocities, all the horrible things the Democratic Party did in support of slavery, while historically true, were done by conservatives! It wasn't until rather recently that liberals took hold of the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party became the domain of conservatives.
Yes, Lincoln was a Republican. He was also a liberal.
Perhaps this historical quirk is because the Democrats have always been populist, while the Republicans have always been elitist. That much, at least, has not changed. In the 1800's, elitism meant being scholarly, well educated, and prone to the liberal ideas that came from such high status. In modern America, where a college degree is almost ubiquitous, liberal ideology has become populist, while elitism is a wealth-mongerer's idea.
D'Souza shows the atrocities of the Civil War, rightly lionizing Abraham Lincoln, and showing the bloody battles that ensued when North fought South. In these depicted battles, one hears the iconic "Wilhelm scream" often heard in Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and any other number of films.
Really?
D'Souza then makes a whole string of claims that are factually wrong. He implies, citing the congressional voting record of Davey Crockett, that he was a Republican Party anti-slave politician. Not so. He and his family owned slaves in Tennessee. He states that Republicans opposed the legislation which brought about the Cherokee "Trail of Tears." But this is false, as the Republican Party wasn't formed until 1854. And it was liberals who stood in opposition to it.
In an unprecedented lie, he states that "No Republican ever owned slaves." This is empirically false, as every Republican congressman from (for example) the state of Kentucky owned slaves between 1854 and 1864! And Ulysses S. Grant owned a slave (although he, to his credit, freed that one).
Dinesh goes so far as depicting the KKK as the military wing of the Democrats. But this is exaggeration heaped on top of the most extremist spin possible. The KKK was distinct from the Democratic party, and had its own agenda. That's why, when the Democratic party turned liberal and the Republican party turned conservative, members of the KKK went from being largely Democrat to being largely Republican. The KKK was, and still is, a conservative, retrograde movement.
Dinesh says that more Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 than Democrats did. But this is also historically false. The Civil Rights Act passed with 199 Democratic votes and 163 Republican votes. Perhaps D'Souza was looking at the percentages. 64% of all Democrats voted for it, while 81% of Republicans voted in favor. Republicans just happened to be a minority in congress at that time. But by this point, Dinesh has told so many lies that I'm not willing to grant him any latitude for his misrepresentation. He got the facts wrong. Again.
He claims that Republicans gave women the right to vote. Not quite. In the Senate, women's suffrage passed on a vote of 56 to 25, with 36 Republicans and 20 Democrats voting in favor, and 8 Republicans and 17 Democrats voting against. The Democrats still had many conservatives among their ranks, but it was truly a bipartisan vote.
D'Souza's ghastly film does have one redeeming quality amidst all this falsehood, and that is that it remembers a powerful and righteous woman: Ida B. Wells. Ida Wells was black, a suffragette, a journalist, and a tireless campaigner for black rights. A Republican? You bet. But she was also a liberal - something D'Souza conveniently forgets to mention. It's sad that Ida Wells has had her honorable legacy hijacked by the likes of Dinesh and his truth-twisters, but the fact that more people will learn of this wonderful woman, and the great work she did, is at least one positive.
The film also quite rightly points out that President Woodrow Wilson, in office from 1913 to 1921, was a stark racist. This is quite true. And also irrelevant. Democrats were still conservatives back then. The depiction in the film of Wilson watching "Birth of a Nation" and seeing a ghostly image of a KKK clansman leaping from off the screen to gallop across the White House lawn is nothing more than a waste special effects.
Dinesh tries to debunk the notion that the Democrats became liberal under FDR. But there's nothing to debunk. Democrats didn't become liberals under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But they did start to become that way! The Great Depression was on, and that meant that the part that embraced the people's needs would be there for a long time. To help pass the New Deal, FDR struck a compromise to include black rights as part of the package, thus bringing in some Republicans. Dinesh D'Souza tried to depict this as a sleazy, back-room deal designed to garner black votes. In truth, there was some vote-gathering strategy behind it, but also there was a genuine purpose that had good intentions for black Americans. And while the legislation of the New Deal didn't go far enough in helping end racial tensions, it was a step in the right direction. The word "Democrat" began to mean being in favor of government programs, unions, and the common working man. The word "Republican" began to be associated with the robber-baron wealthy. And while Democrats had not yet fully pivoted into embracing civil rights, the alteration was beginning to happen.
D'Souza tries to convince his audience that the "Big Flip" didn't happen. He points out that the number of Republican legislators who changed to the Democratic party in order to side with minority rights were relatively few. He has a nice chart showing the number of congressmen and senators who flipped from the Republican Party to the Democratic party between 18-doesn't-matter and 1960. And only a few of the faces in the chart go from red to blue.
Well, fine, except American history didn't end in 1960! John F. Kennedy met with Dr. King and leaders of the NAACP in 1960 and made them a pitch that really began to turn the tide. But it would take another four years before the voter loyalties completely turned over. The real point in which black voters turned their loyalties to the Democratic Party was in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee. Blacks couldn't stand that the Republican candidate was one who had both fought and voted against the Civil Rights Act. The Republicans had their excuses for Goldwater, but black voters didn't care. For them, it was the last straw.
And when did Republicans fully embrace the racism of the South? Why, with Richard Nixon and his "Southern Strategy," to dog-whistle the anti-black vote of the former Dixiecrats and make permanent Republicans out of them. That was 1968. The strategy worked, and Republicans have been accommodating of soft-core, and sometimes even hard-core, racism ever since.
Dinesh interviews a Vanderbilt professor of political science named Carol Swain. She stands out among the crowd because she is a black woman who advocates for the Republican party. She speaks very candidly about the dark past of the Democratic party, and how it was not very friendly towards black people. But she too fails to mention the part about Democrats being conservatives back then. Why might that be?
Upon looking at Carol Swain's resume, it's not hard to discern the reason. She is a Christian, and wants to promote the party that supports putting Christian values and Christian favoritism into politics. To that end, she's willing to bend anything to the Republican party, even to the point of saying that the Democrats shady, conservative ancient past should be what we judge the modern Democratic party to be.
Stupid bitch.
One of the lowest and dirtiest tricks that Dinesh pulls is beyond the pale. He dares to attack your heroine and mine, Margaret Sanger.
He claims that Margaret Sanger once addressed a group of KKK leaders with whom she sympathized. The addressing the group of KKK leaders part is true. But sympathized? Not even close. This was debunked by Snopes years ago, and you can read about it here. Her address to a group of women within the KKK was not a pleasant experience for Margaret Sanger, as she describes in her autobiography:
"From the time I started lecturing in 1916 I have appeared in many places — halls, churches, women's clubs, homes, theaters. I have had many types of audiences — cotton workers, churchmen, liberals, Socialists, scientists, clubmen, and fashionable, philanthropically minded women.
[She describes another incident in which seating arrangements nearly overshadowed the lecture, then goes on:]
"All the world over, in Penang and Skagway, in El Paso and Helsingfors, I have found women's psychology in the matter of child-bearing essentially the same, no matter what the class, religion, or economic status. Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.
[She describes the odd travel arrangements it took to get there, and how she was left out in the cold for hours before being brought in to the surreal gathering to speak. Then she continues:]
"Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand.
"In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York. Under a curfew law everything in Silver Lake shut at nine o'clock. I could not even send a telegram to let my family know whether I had been thrown in the river or was being held incommunicado. It was nearly one before I reached Trenton, and I spent the night in a hotel."
Margaret Sanger was not given the warmest reception by the KKK, and she wasn't particularly fond of them, either. So much for D'Souza's claim that Sanger and the Klan were allies.
In all truth, Sanger did have some sympathies towards the eugenics movement. (Full disclosure: so do I.) She felt that the weak, the sick and the mentally incapacitated ought not breed. But this is a far cry from believing that blacks should be universally sterilized.
Yes, there were some who took the idea of breeding the best among us humans and twisted it. There were people who said that only whites should breed. There were instances of forced sterilization forced upon some black people. But Margaret Sanger was not among those who agreed with such ideas. In fact, many Republicans, such as Teddy Roosevelt, embraced the eugenics idea.
Dinesh cites the sad case of Carrie Buck, who was forcefully sterilized for being "feeble minded." The surgery was carried out while she was an inmate at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded. The authority for this procedure took place under the authority of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, part of the state of Virginia's eugenics program. He disdainfully quotes Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes saying in the case of Buck v. Bell, "three generations of imbeciles are enough," he fails to mention that Holmes was a Republican. He also fails to mention the other Republicans on the Supreme Court in its 8 to 1 decision. The fact that Carrie Bell was white, not black, also seems to undermine D'Souza's assertion that eugenics was out to destroy black people.
Then he lies even more egregiously. He cites this oft-twisted Margaret Sanger quote:
"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
But actually, that's not a complete quote. What she actually said was:
"The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
In other words, she did not want such a false notion to go out, and black ministers were the key to that for her.
This misquoted quote has come up on numerous occasions, but perhaps most famously back in 2011, when presidential candidate Herman Cain used cited it as a reason why he thought Planned Parenthood was out to destroy the black community. He didn't cite the quote word-for-word, but he referenced it clearly enough so that people knew what he was referencing. Politifact then researched the claim and found it to be false. You can read about that here.
In 1966, when Margaret Sanger was an old woman, Planned Parenthood bestowed the Margaret Sanger award on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He accepted, and while he was unable to attend the event, his wife Coretta Scott King showed up in his place to read his speech. In it, King wrote:
"There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister."
Sanger’s autobiography had been published nearly 30 years before King’s speech, so her earlier address was no secret. Obviously, Dr. King did not think of Sanger as a racist, nor did he believe that Planned Parenthood was out to destroy the "negro race."
D'Souza goes off on a few tangents after lying about Sanger. For some strange reason he takes issue with "The Life of Julia" website ads that Obama did back in 2012, and says that this somehow all ties in with the pro-government controlling mindset of the Democratic Party. In truth, I think he just missed out on including it in his first movie, and wanted to tie up that loose end. No bullet of Obama-criticism can be left un-fired from Dinesh D'Souza's verbal gun!
Then he goes off on some sort of holy crusade against Saul Alinsky. For those who don't know, Alinsky is literally the guy who wrote the book on rabble-rousing with his 1971 publication, "Rules for Radicals." D'Souza goes off on a 20-minute long ad hominem attack in which he casts Alinsky as a true Svengali with mafia ties and a truly criminal past. He then casts him to be some sort of father figure of Hillary Clinton's, and even Barack Obama's.
Here, for the first time, Hillary is seriously mentioned. I am now one hour and fifteen minutes into a movie which takes an hour and forty minutes. D'Souza has wasted 75% of his movie just building up to this part.
D'Souza says that Hillary first met Alinsky while she was in high school. He correctly points out that Hillary did a senior thesis on Saul Alinsky while an undergraduate at Wellsley College. But Dinesh's citing of all this Alinsky-related stuff is nothing more nor less than an extension of D'Souza's initial mistake he made back in 2012 when he did his film, '2016: Obama's America.' He assumes that any mentor of Obama or Hillary must have bought into his entire ideology, flaws and all. He doesn't seem to fathom that anyone could possibly look up to someone and reject part of that person's past, or certain opinions said person may have.
As if to emphasize what a gap there is supposed to be between Democrats and African-Americans, Dinesh shows a clip of Hillary's commencement speech which she gave at Wellsley College, in which Edward Brooke, the first ever black Senator, was in attendance. Hillary mentions that she finds herself "reacting to some of the things Senator Brooke has said," and you can see him visibly flinch at the audacity of such a young woman. But the speech itself is nothing all that radical. D'Souza wastes his time citing it. If you want to read it for yourself, you can do so here.
Dinesh suggests that Hillary chose Bill not out of a sense of love or partnership, but out of a recognition that she could use him to her own ends. By ignoring, or even enabling, Bill's philandering with multiple women, she could hold a kind of control over him that would allow her to direct power from behind the lines, eventually paving the way for her to seize power herself. Dinesh thinks that Hillary deliberately "fixes" Bill's problems as a means of control. She pursues and destroys any woman who claims to have been sexually harassed by Bill, or had consensual sex with Bill. Then she beats Bill over the head with the resulting guilt like a bludgeon. Dinesh finds this utterly despicable. Philandering by men, according to him, at least has a long, respected tradition among presidents and men of power. But for a wife to dominate such behavior over a man? Utterly hideous!
All this flies in the face of what we know historically to be true. Dinesh depicts Bill as a college boy surrounded by girls. But Bill was a band geek, and a pudgy shy sort of guy. He didn't really begin to get approached by women until he was governor of Arkansas, and then the sudden attention he got from women went to his head. He was not a philanderer singled out by Hillary for control purposes!
Nor does Hillary "fix" Bill's sexual problems. Yes, Hillary has ruthlessly pursued those women who claimed Bill had affairs with him, but she did so on the strength of what Bill was saying. Bill denied the affairs, and so Hillary, taking him at his word, advocated for her husband with all the gusto of a faithful wife. Only later, after learning the affairs were true, did she turn on Bill. And believe me, you would not want to be Bill Clinton in a room with her after that point! This is what we know according to friends, coworkers, and colleagues who witnessed it all. Pick up a book, Mr. D'Souza!
For Hillary, Monica Lewinsky was the last straw. She barely spoke to Bill ever again until she decided in her Senate run in 2000, as her biographers all report. Dinesh's whole premise is built upon his own imagination.
At this point, Dinesh only briefly mentions Hillary's emails. He doesn't have to do more. But he makes the mistake of citing "Guccifer," the supposed hacker who claimed to have hacked Hillary's private server. The film must have finished its final cut before FBI Director James Comey blew that false claim right out of the water, telling everyone that Guccifer did not hack Hillary's server. Guccifer is a phony, and so is Dinesh D'Souza.
Oh, and by the way, the thought in the back of my head, and probably in the back of everyone else's head while in the theater, was, "Whatever you do, don't mention Donald Trump!" Which D'Souza wisely did not do.
And that basically amounted to the entire thing for Dinesh. The remainder of the film is ten minutes worth of unnecessary montage, religious imagery, and patriotic songs. But he does mention one more interesting thing. He admits that because of his conviction, he cannot vote. And this is true. He is free, but still on probation. So his voting rights are forfeit for this term.
Think about that. Dinesh D'Souza cannot vote. So he wants you to vote his way for him. So the theme for the entire film is, "I cannot vote because I am a convicted criminal. So I've made this film so that you, the law-abiding public, will vote the way that I, a proven felon, want you to vote."
Seriously, dude?
You know, there's a good reason why we don't let felons on probation vote. We don't want their criminal mindset to reflect upon our democracy. And while Obama is currently in the process of commuting sentences for minor drug offenders, and giving ex-cons the right to vote again (and rightly so!), we must ask ourselves why, if he's still on probation, should Dinesh D'Souza have any sway whatsoever in how any of us casts our ballot!
We know what Dinesh D'Souza is. He is a Christian. And not just a Christian, he is the sort who will say anything, and do anything, in order to advance the church in America, culturally and politically. He has therefore made himself into something we recognize all-too-well: a liar for Jesus! And this Jesus-liar has decreed that you abandon the Democrats, vote Republican, and let the Christian masses stuff their religious dogma down everyone's throat, whether they like it or not. Well, I say, "What a D'ouchebag!"
At the end of 2016: Obama's America, some people actually cheered. But four years later, there was no cheering at the conclusion of this film. The audience was even smaller. I had to go well out of my way to even see it. And perhaps part of that is because I saw this much later after its initial release than I did back in 2012. But I have a gut feeling that the real reason is that the elderly conservative bombasters are dying off. I feel what hasn't died off yet is skulking away in shame at the prospect of a Trump presidency. And I feel that this film, twice as neurotic as its predecessor from four years prior, is one which made too many factual mistakes for even die-hard conservatives to stand by it.
Eric
*
No comments:
Post a Comment