Dinesh responds to some ineffectual bleating from President Airhead. (H/T Reformed Seth)

Excerpt:

For weeks the President tried to ignore the film, no doubt hoping that it would go away.  Unfortunately for Obama, the film has continued to gain momentum.  It has been seen by more than 2 million people, earned more than $27 million, and become the second biggest political documentary of all time.  So now he has decided to come out with guns blazing.

Yet what a clumsy, ill-aimed and misleading blast this is.  It begins with a quotation deploring “smear journalism”.  We read that this quotation is from the “Columbia Journalism Review on2016: Obama’s America.”  Yet the Columbia Journalism Review article was published in September 2010, nearly two years before the film came out!  It turns out that the magazine was critiquing one of my earlier books The Roots of Obama’s Rage.

Apparently relying on a range of left-wing discredited sources, Obama lists what it takes to be four “flat-out falsehoods”.  Let me list and address them in turn.

• First, “D’Souza falsely claimed that President Obama said he didn’t believe in American exceptionalism.”

Oh really?  Obama was asked in 2009 whether he believed in American exceptionalism.  He replied that he did, just as the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.  The clear implication of Obama’s remarks is that if everyone thinks they are exceptional, no one really is.

Read President Obama’s remarks about US, British and Greek exceptionalism here.

• Second, “D’Souza falsely asserted that President Obama funded $2 billion in Brazilian oil exploration.”  The Obama team claims that Obama had “nothing to do with the loan.”

Well, the undisputed fact is that the Export-Import Bank awarded more than $2 billion in loans and loan guarantees to Brazil.  The Export-Import Bank is a U.S. government agency and policy for the agency is set by the Obama administration.  So how can the Obama administration escape responsibility for its own policies?

Moreover, we know that Obama himself approves of the policy.  In 2011, Obama went to Brazil, a country where, as he put it, “the legacy of colonialism is still fresh.”  There, on March 19, 2011, he reminded the Brazilians of American support for Brazilian oil exploration and added, “We want to help with technology and support to develop these oil reserves safely, and when you’re ready to start selling, we want to be one of your best customers.”

Moreover, Obama’s Brazil subsidy is not an isolated case; the Obama administration has—again through the Export-Import Bank—awarded billions to Mexico and Colombia for oil drilling and refining in those countries.

Read President Obama’s remarks in Brazil here.

A review of the movie”2016: Obama’s America” – a project of Indian-American Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza.

Excerpt:

My wife and I went to see a showing of the film at the Regal theater in Winter Park Village. It was about three-quarters full. We didn’t go with a group but noticed that many in the audience came in groups of more than just a single couple. There were also examples of grandparents, parents and children. At the end of the film, the audience broke into loud and spontaneous applause. Was this only due to the film “playing to the choir”?

In part perhaps, but in the next few weeks I predict it will reach the audience we most need to reach -young voters -and are the most avid movie goers and the least likely to be reached by more traditional methods.

[…]Dinesh D’Souza is an engaging, attractive dark skinned immigrant from India whose life and career follows in parallel with Obama’s – born and married in the same years and able to judge American institutions and values from a third world perspective.

The film does not accept any of the more controversial attacks on Obama’s biography but seeks to explain how his own words and thoughts cited continually throughout the film from the President’s autobiography ‘Dreams From My Father’ are a thread running through his policies and are at the core of what motivates him and makes him intent on downsizing, disarming, and apologizing for America, abandoning out allies such as Great Britain, Israel and Poland, fawning and bowing before Muslim despots, and seeking to create a society where individual initiative, ambition and self-reliance are replaced by the collectivist goals that have failed all over the world.

[…]2016 examines Barack Obama’s relationship with his absent father who was an activist in the anti-colonial struggle against the British, and following independence became part of that elite clique who fostered a one party bureaucratic, socialist state in Kenya that crushed all local government and free initiative resulting in a downward spiral of economic stagnation and poverty shared by Obama’s half-brother in the slums of Nairobi.

[…]We follow the President’s life in where his mother remarries a local Indonesian man (also a Muslim, Lolo Soteiro),  who eventually becomes a successful businessman and in so doing, alienates Obama and his mother who believe they are betraying the socialist and collectivist legacy of Barack Obama Senior.

This psychological portrait is one that makes sense and can be understood and appreciated by many young people who are themselves the product of homes in which there is divorce and remarriage.

The President’s endorsement of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement extends to the world stage in which the antagonists are portrayed as the 99% – the occupied and the exploitative 1 % – the occupiers.

Obama emotionally sympathizes with all those he places in the category of the victims of the colonialist white European nations (the one-percenters), returning the bust of Churchill, the gift of the British government, praising Islam as a progressive force while denying its oppression of women, children, non-Muslim minorities, his  policies towards  third world nations such as Mexico and Brazil whom his policies have encouraged to develop their oil industries while retarding our own, secretly supporting Argentina in its attempt to seize the Falkland Islands from Britain by force, pressuring Israel (regarded too as “occupiers”) to retreat from defensible borders, total passivity in failing to support the millions of demonstrators in the street against the tyrannical regime of the mullahs in Iran, etc.

Most damning of all are the close associations of the President and his most important mentors ignored by the media and Senator John McCain’s campaign in 2004 – convicted terrorist Bill Ayers, the “Reverend Wright (God Damn America and its “Liberation Theology” church in Chicago) and long-time Communist party member Frank Marshall Davis.

This is a powerful film that will exert a profound influence. As the billboards and advertisements on television proclaim… Love Him or Hate Him, you need to see this film.

Does that sound good or what? There’s a lot of talk about how this election needs to be about grown up ideas. I think that these long form arguments elevate, rather than lower, the debate. We need to have adult conversations about who Obama is and what his policies are intended to achieve – what is his end game?

Trailer 1 of 3:

Trailer 2 of 3:

Trailer 3 of 3:

Here’s Dinesh explaining what his movie is about at CPAC 2012:

Keep in mind that Dinesh is a Christian apologist and has debated people like Christopher Hitchens. This is his newest project.

Go see it!

UPDATE: Reformed Seth sent me this interview with Dinesh D’Souza. He’s being interviewed by Stanley Fish.