Skip to main content

Heart of Darkness


I imagine everyone is aware of the Doomsday scenario that surrounds December 21 this year, but it seems Dinesh D'Souza is thinking beyond these cataclysmic events to an apocalyptic 2016 by which time President Obama will have destroyed America as we know it.  Richard Brody debunks D'Souza's theory which essentially casts Obama as an "Islamicist Candidate," steeped in radical Islamic and Marxist ideas who has patiently waited for his second term to unleash his "final solution."

D'Souza takes the viewer into the "heart of darkness," with journeys to Kenya and Indonesia in search of Barack Obama's roots.  While he is careful to avoid the usual "birther" arguments, Brody points out that D'Souza essentially presents Obama as an immigrant, much like himself, only with an entirely different "world view" shaped by the various radical "father figures" in his youth.

Most of us have grown weary of this sort of hyperbole, but this film has gone viral in the Christian conservative community, since D'Souza serves as president (at least until recently) at King's College, a Christian liberal arts college in New York City. He was drawn himself into his own scandal surrounding an apparently illicit affair at a religious conference in South Carolina, upstaging his film the last few days, as many Evangelicals took offense to D'Souza flirting around with Denise Joseph.  But, I imagine all will be forgiven, as it usually is in these cases, especially when the larger goal remains to defeat Obama by any means necessary.

Comments

  1. He's one of those "famous people" that I fortunately have little knowledge of, but did see a news story yesterday that he had resigned as president of the college.

    ReplyDelete
  2. He's certainly not worth exploring in any depth, but it is interesting how he went from being a neo-con to a religious conservative, or maybe he found a way to balance the two?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Born again Dinesh D'Souza ~ another candidate for the title of Mr "Credibility".

    ReplyDelete
  4. You wouldn't believe how many times this movie popped up on facebook this past month. I thought Richard Brody perfectly summed up the shallow attempt to discredit Obama, recycling four years of nonsense into a trite unintended mockumentary.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dinesh D'Souza is crazy. That's all I have to say for now.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Mr Right Wing Credibility is caught again:


    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/souza-diverted-profits-anti-obama-film-lawsuit-article-1.1194471?localLinksEnabled=false



    " THE CONSERVATIVE pundit recently ousted as head of a Christian college in Manhattan for alleged adultery is now being accused of breaking another commandment — thou shalt not steal.

    Dinesh D’Souza allegedly diverted profits from “2016: Obama’s America,” the anti-Obama movie that’s been a big hit with right wingers, to a new book project, one of D’Souza’s partners charged in a lawsuit.''


    ReplyDelete
  7. Apparently, someone feels he was snubbed,

    http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/12/07/hit-anti-obama-documentary-2016-snubbed-by-academy-awards/

    ReplyDelete
  8. Millions of people went to see Dumb and Dumber too ....

    ReplyDelete
  9. I thought that was an amusing argument as well. I don't think Michael Moore got a nomination for Fahrenheit 911 either, and he drew a much larger audience than Dinesh. Seems to me that he should have submitted this mockumentary to the Golden Globes for best comedy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified.  After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution.  Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through.  But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 .  The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others.  Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified.  A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.