Entertainment Weekly’s print edition has more or less ignored the summer’s sleeper hit “2016: Obama’s America.”
The magazine didn’t even assign a reviewer to critique the film as it does with virtually every new release.
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Until now.
Owen Gleiberman, one of the film’s main movie critics and a professed liberal, has finally seen “2016.” And, taking a page out of MSNBC’s dog whistle playbook, Gleiberman has dubbed the film racist.
The basic thesis of 2016: Obama’s America makes almost no sense, to the point that a lot of viewers may be tempted to laugh it off. Yet here’s how politics now works: The argument doesn’t have to make sense, because D’Souza’s underlying message is that Obama is a stranger, a man you “don’t know,” a refugee from another land, another culture. Deep down, he’s an angry Third World upstart just like his father. By now, most of us understand that the “birther” theory — the preposterously unfactual notion that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States — is really a code for race. And what’s insidious about 2016: Obama’s Americais that the whole movie, in a sense, is code for the birther theory. It never says: Obama wasn’t born here. But it signifies that he might as well not have been.
