Barack brigade hits out at Indian filmmaker

Indian American filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, whose documentary on the US President has climbed up the box office chart, has come in for severe criticism by the the Obama Campaign which accused him of launching a smear campaign against Barack Obama.

The Obama Campaign also alleged that the movie is a deliberate distortion of Obama's record and world view.

‘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,’ the Obama Campaign said in a recent blog.

Posted on its website 'Truth Team', Obama Campaign alleges that D'Souza's writings and film are ‘based on lies (and) should not come as a surprise’ to anyone given his ‘long history of attempting to add a veneer of intellectual respectability to fringe theories, conspiratorial fear-mongering, and flat-out falsehoods’.

Identifying him D'Souza as a right-wing author, the Obama Campaign says the documentary ‘falsely smears President Obama as having a hidden agenda bent on realising 'anti-colonial' ambitions’.

A ‘self-proclaimed’ expert on the President, D'Souza bases the film around his own past works, which were previously described as ‘the worst kind of smear journalism’, and riddled with ‘lazy errors’, it alleged. 

The documentary, which equates reelection of US President Barack Obama with the death and dismemberment of the United States of America, this week, according to Box Office Mojo, has been running at number three.

It has grossed about USD 26 million so far and is running in more than 2,000 movie theaters across the country.

Released on 24 August, so far it is the number two highest-grossing political documentary behind Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11'. Though it has climbed up the box office chart and is highly popular among Republican and Tea party supporters, the movie has been blasted by the critics.

‘The worst kind of smear journalism?a singularly disgusting work,’ wrote Columbia Journalism Review.

Variety called it a ‘cavalcade of conspiracy theories, psycho-politico conjectures and incendiary labelling’; while the Los Angeles Times labelled it as a ‘badly disguised and overly long attack ad’.