“The facts show that 2016: Obama’s America is nothing more than an insidious attempt to dishonestly smear the President by giving intellectual cover to the worst in subterranean conspiracy theories and false, partisan attacks.” That’s the stance the Obama campaign is taking on the biggest documentary of the year.
Unfortunately, everyone missed it the first time around. Sorry, President Obama. We’re clearly not reading your multitudes of blog entries on your campaign website. This is obvious because it took the world until Sept. 11 to read the president’s direct response to Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary. The post was published on Sept. 5, just as the film approached its title as the second-most popular political documentary ever. The Hollywood Reporter first discovered the dated response, and to be fair, it did take the Obama camp 60 days to respond to the skyrocketing conservative film.
Of course, it took mere seconds for the rest of the world to respond to the doc. As BarrackObama.com reminds readers, an avalanche of reviews and commentary attacked the film for being
“lazy” and employing
“pseudo-scholarly leaps of logic.” Some of the kinder reviews employ more neutral phrases like “
attention-grabber.” But in total, the response has been rather scathing.
And that should come as little surprise. D’Souza withstood a barrage of negative criticism when his precursor to the film, his book
The Roots of Obama’s Rage, was previewed in the form a
Forbes article titled
“How Obama Thinks.” The piece sustained criticism from pundits on both sides, and even prompted Vice President
Joe Biden to speak out, calling the article “science fiction” in an appearance on MSNBC. The Obama campaign’s response to 2016 highlights past criticisms against D’Souza, saying his past works “have also been extensively mocked and lambasted by commentators of all partisan stripes.”
For readers who might be quick to jump to the conclusion that Liberals are the only ones complaining about the doc, BarrackObama.com quickly provides commentary from Conservative blogger R.R. Reno, who “slammed D’Souza’s argument, which insinuates that President Obama is not a true American because he is ‘captive to the ideology of [Kenyan] Luo tribesman from the ‘50s,’ as ‘both unwarranted and misguided.'” In addition, the Columbia Journalism Review called the article “the worst kind of smear journalism.”
Still not convinced? Well, there’s more. After properly establishing support for the article’s argument, the post claims the film is guilty of four blatant falsehoods:
1. D’Souza falsely claims that Obama doesn’t believe that America’s identity and core values are exceptional. This is accompanied by a link to the transcription of a speech in which the president praises the U.S. for its exceptionalism.
2. D’Souza falsely ties Obama to providing $2 million in funding for a Brazilian oil exploration. The campaign claims Obama was not involved with the loan.
3. D’Souza claims Obama backed the release of Scotland’s Lockerbie bomber, but the post provides a statement and a letter from the Obama administration objecting to the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to Libya.
4. Finally, D’Souza claims that the bank bailouts were passed by Obama, but widespread news coverage of the bill shows that President George W. Bush signed the program into law in October 2008.
Did you see 2016: Obama’s America? Why do you think it took this long for Obama’s camp to issue a response?
[Photo Credit: Rocky Mountain Pictures]
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