Northern Colorado Gazette

by Peter Grady –

The Obama campaign has spoken out against a film currently being shown in Greeley, saying  it distorts the president’s  record and world view.

The film “2016: Obama’s America,” which is currently showing at the Carmike theater in Greeley is directed by scholar and author Dinesh D’Souza.  The documentary film which is still going strong several weeks after its release is based on D’Souza’s book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

The film is intended to show the president’s anti-colonial attitudes which it says were developed from his father Barack Obama Sr. The film draws heavily on Obama’s own words and interviews with family members and friends including the president’s half-brother George.

In the film, D’Souza establishes a tie between Barack Obama and those he associated with while growing up. While many know about the president’s association with Bill Ayers, who said in an interview published on 9/11, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough” and Rev. Jeremiah Wright who preaches and teaches black liberation theology; the film also show other similar individuals that influenced him such as noted Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis who the film describes as a father figure to the president.

On Sept. 5, when the film became the second most successful documentary film in history, the campaign responded to the information presented in the film. The president’s campaign website BarackObama.com posted an entry lambasting the film for among other things, inventing “claims and ideas from a book the President wrote two decades ago.”

The entry quotes from several negative views of the film and claims that D’Souza has a “long history of attempting to add a veneer of intellectual respectability to fringe theories, conspiratorial fear-mongering and flat-out falsehoods.”

Interestingly, unlike other documentaries by those on both the left and right, D’Souza presents both sides including quotes by Joe Biden and others criticizing the film. In an interview with Bill Maher, D’Souza noted that the film often featured Obama’s own voice, “so we actually let Obama tell his story.”

The film is scheduled to run at the Carmike Cinema through Thursday, Sept. 20.

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