Obama Campaigns Calls Dinesh D’Souza’s Documentary “Distortion”

The Obama campaign lashed out at conservative Indian American commentator and writer Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary that has broken Box Office records for its portrayal of President Obama.

The documentary, “2016: Obama’s America” which draws from D’Souza’s earlier book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”, portrays him as an American President who has a Third World view of America conditioned by a Kenyan father and not one who believes in American “exceptionalism”. 

The campaign’s somewhat delayed critique comes weeks after the release of the movie which hit screens days before the Republican Convention in August. 

In a Sept. 5 blog post on the barackobama.com site, the campaign accuses D’Souza of “deliberate distortion” of the President’s record and world view.  

The campaign branded D’Souza as a “Right-wing author” and “self-proclaimed expert on the President” whose movie “falsely smears President Obama as having a hidden agenda bent on realizing “anti-colonial” ambitions.”

Quoting lines from reviews in Columbia Journalism Review, Variety magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Associated Press, and Bloomberg news, the campaign notes that the first third of the movie is dedicated to D’Souza’s own life story of spending time overseas as a child and getting a privileged Ivy League education, but the similarities end there. D’Souza, it says “baselessly” claims that “his supposedly similar background gives him a special insight into the President’s thinking.”

“But while President Obama’s time as head of the Harvard Law Review won praise for his balanced and even-handed approach, D’Souza helped found a student newspaper infamous for ugly attacks on students and teachers,” the campaign says.

The movie “strays from reality,” it adds and accuses D’Souza of a history of “attempting to add a veneer of intellectual respectability to fringe theories, conspiratorial fear-mongering and flat-out falsehoods.”

Following the release of the movie before the Republican Convention in August, D’Souza accused liberal newscasters of ignoring his documentary which was garnering millions at the Box Office, while in previous years they had lauded movies made by controversial filmmaker Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine) and former Vice President Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth).

“I think they are scared — and they have a reason to be scared,” D’Souza is quoted saying in TheBlaze.com. “But I certainly welcome the Obama team getting into this because it seems like the old strategy has completely failed, you know: Ignore it, pray really hard and hope it goes away.”