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Townhall…
Al
Gore Versus '2016'
By Brent Bozell
Sep 28, 2012
Two
weeks ago, Dinesh D'Souza's documentary
"2016: Obama's America" passed Al Gore's "An Inconvenient
Truth" for second place on the all-time box-office money list for
political documentaries. It now has a box office gross of more than $32
million. But if you're an independent or a liberal who's unplugged from
conservative websites and talk radio, you'd never know.
You
didn't see D'Souza on CBS or NBC (although
he showed up on ABC's "Nightline" in late night). There were no cover
stories in Time or Newsweek. The film opened on just one screen in
Houston when
it premiered on July 13, and then spread to 10, and eventually to 1,000
theaters in August, and 2,000 theaters in September. A cultural
sensation, yes
-- but somehow not newsworthy.
Al
Gore, naturally, had every advantage of a
beloved liberal almost-president. When it hit theaters in May of 2006,
Time
magazine wrote, "The movie got raves at the Sundance Film Festival ...
In
Los Angeles theaters, the trailers have been getting ovations." On NBC,
Katie Couric sat down in the outdoors with Gore and told him that in
the movie,
"you're funny, vulnerable, disarming, self-effacing." On CBS, anchor
Harry Smith gushed, "The box office receipts would indicate that it's
an
action movie -- you did better per screening than almost anything
that's come
out this week."
Even
after Gore's slideshow lecture/film
eventually sputtered out at the Cineplex, several more rounds of
fawning
followed: an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize, and in between the
gushing
lines came the idea that Gore might (or should) run again for
president. The
"Goracle" gush was so heavy that Time collected it all together. He
was "Al Gore -- the improbably charismatic, Academy Award-winning,
Nobel
Prize-nominated environmental prophet with an army of followers and
huge
reserves of political and cultural capital at his command."
And
yet, D'Souza's film was the Little Engine
That Could -- the film that could surpass Gore at the box office. He
didn't
need MSNBC to put him on, although in August, he slammed them as
cowardly:
"You could watch that channel and not even know we have a film out --
unless you saw a commercial that we're running for our film. You look
at Lawrence
O'Donnell, you look at Rachel Maddow, you look at Chris Matthews. I
mean, look
at those cowards! ... I would love to cross swords with those guys, but
I think
they're all hiding under the desk…
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
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