Rocky Mountain PicturesIt isn't the latest torture porn offering that the Columbia Journalism Review called "a singularly disgusting work."
But the team working to reelect President Barack Obama wants to make sure you know exactly what the CJR was talking about.
A post on the "Truth Team" section of the president's website attempts to demolish, point by point, the claims being made in director Dinesh D'Souza's controversial new documentary, 2016 Obama's America, in which the filmmaker argues that Obama, inspired by the father he barely knew, aspired to the presidency to spread socialism in America.
"Admitting President Obama was born in the U.S. is what Bloomberg [News] calls 'as close to moderation as this nutty film gets,'" cites the post, dated Sept. 5, which maintains that the film is a "deliberate distortion of President Obama's record and world view."
Full of mumbo-jumbo or not, the Obama administration may have been spurred to defensive action after 2016 Obama's America passed An Inconvenient Truth and Sicko to become the second-highest-grossing politically themed documentary ever after Michael Moore's George W. Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11. Its take after two weekends in wide release stands at almost $26.7 million.
(Perspective alert: Fahrenheit 9/11 grossed $119.2 million in theaters.)
Obama's team quotes numerous negative reviews (AP called it "not plausible"; Slate said it was riddled with "lazy" errors) and independently blasts D'Souza as having a "long history" of using "fringe theories, conspiratorial fear-mongering, and flat-out falsehoods" to polish his intellectual facade.
The post also takes time out to point out examples of the myriad alleged falsehoods in the film, including claims that Obama doesn't believe in American exceptionalism (he's repeatedly praised it); Obama funded $2 billion in Brazilian oil exploration (he did no such thing); Obama backed Scotland's release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (he strongly objected); and Obama passed the 2008 bank bailouts (then-President Bush signed off).
D'Souza, for his part, has gone on TV shows ranging from Real Time With Bill Maher to Piers Morgan Tonight to Hannity to defend his argument, with varying degrees of success.