HILLARY'S AMERICA (2016)

A documentary film by Dinesh D’Souza and Bruce Schooley was a film I didn’t want to see let alone review feeling it was going to be nothing more than a hack job trying to destroy Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the Presidency. And for the most part that’s true, however what I found was a film that for at least 60 minutes of it’s 107 minute running time was more a history lesson on what the Democratic Party was during the 18th and 19th centuries. Yes, I will admit that the Democratic Party of that era represented the conservatives and the Republicans the progressives, however sometime at the turn of the 20th century things started to change and by the time the 1960’s rolled around the Democrats had become the party of change. Through the 1920’s to the present age the Democratic party was mainly responsible for enacting Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights and most recently Universal Healthcare. However to this film’s credit I came to see that there are more shades of grey than can be counted. For instance I always believed the Democrats were solely responsible for the Civil Rights bill and in a way they were because it was started by President Kennedy and brought to fruition by President Johnson. But 80% of Republicans voted for it while only 67% of Democrats did, however there were far more Democrats than Republicans in the House and Senate. Also the Southern Democrats started fleeing the party because of this and the Republicans were only too pleased to welcome them. Also the fact that Barry Goldwater was one of only six Republicans to vote against the civil rights legislation while being nominated as the Republican’s nominee for the Presidency in 1964 only helped to solidify the myth that they were all against it. However this film has an agenda and the final 47 minutes were basically a diatribe against Hillary Clinton, painting her as a type of stereotypical cartoon character with carefully edited scenes depicting her as a kind of monster, perpetuating a kind of sham marriage in her blood lust for power. This is where I had to take extreme exception in the reporting and who the filmmakers chose to interview and highlight. As a young defense attorney she was assigned to defend a rapist and though she did not want the case proceeded with it and had crucial evidence thrown out that had been tainted even though she knew the man was guilty. In not representing the man to the best of her ability she could have been disbarred and her legal career destroyed, so what she did was her job as dictated by the laws of the United States. But according to this film she was little more than Satan’s apprentice operating without a soul. Hillary Clinton has made it her life’s goal to help the down trodden and the poor and though one may not agree with her stand on abortion and a woman’s right to choose, until the law is changed she will defend it. Yes, she is not perfect, having voted for the Iraq war was in most people’s estimation a huge blunder, but which one of us has not made serious mistakes, let alone in front of the whole wide world. She chose to forgive her husband’s indiscretions and move on with her life. No matter what one may think of the woman, this film is not a good representation of what she stands for, being severely biased with distorted facts and opinions. I’m giving this film two stars because of the first hour which caused me to do some personal research and discover that much of what was said about the early Democratic Party was true. But not taking responsibility for the fact that the Republican Party over the course of the last one hundred years morphed into what it supposes to despise is the film’s true downfall.