The Obama “documentary” has now earned a whopping $12 million. It was made for roughly $1.5 million (with donations from conservative billionaires). It has been clear from the Republican National Convention that they are pulling no punches. Their campaign, this “documentary” and all of the seething pockets of hate that have been unleashed (a plot to kill the President by members of the military, the Navy SEAL book wherein soldiers “badmouth” Obama), prove that there is only one thing the GOP is united by and that’s out and out hatred of our President, the first black President of the United States, Barack Obama.
It is a horrifying thing to watch. You always wonder how group hatred can build into a movement but it has. With two automatons spewing scripts dictated to them by the Koch brothers and Karl Rove, a large portion of Americans have showed their true colors this week as they applaud any time someone brings up a negative against Obama. You can almost feel the spittle sprinkling forth, can’t you?
To make matters worse, Clint Eastwood – talked to an imaginary chair. Though he said some things that were troubling him, drawing the knife across his neck during his speech mostly summed up what three days in Tampa had come to, other than a hurricane that served as a reminder of how important government intervention can be when it is there (the levees held) and when it isn’t there (Katrina). Meanwhile, whiny liberals who are “disillusioned” with Obama aren’t coming forward, rich donors are being crybabies because Obama won’t play golf with them — and the Citizens United ruling has allowed, for the first time ever in American history, an election to be bought legally.
I thought you might like to know a little about the “filmmaker” D’Souza.
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The filmmaker behind the Obama documentary, which has now tripled its original budget with its box office take, and is sure to become one of the box office stories of the year, has an interesting past. Since no other news outlets have done it, here is a quick look.
While at Dartmouth, D’Souza and Laura Ingraham outed gay students, driving one to consider suicide.
D’Souza believes that the liberals caused 9/11 and wrote a book to try to prove it.
One of the film’s two dozen investors was Joe Ricketts, had proposed a $10 million ad campaign to show Obama’s association with Reverend Wright. He also paid for internet and newspaper advertisements for D’Souza’s book on Obama. But clearly that wasn’t enough for them, despite D’Souza having written a lengthy piece in Forbes magazine furthering his “ooga booga man” theory about Obama’s past.
He once wrote this in the Washington Post:
I also argue that the policies that U.S. “progressives” promote around the world — including abortion rights, contraception for teenagers and gay rights — are viewed as an assault on traditional values by many cultures, and have contributed to the blowback of Islamic rage.
And this:
When Planned Parenthood International opens clinics in non-Western countries and dispenses contraceptives to unmarried girls, many see it as an assault on prevailing religious and traditional values. When human rights groups use their interpretation of international law to pressure non-Western countries to overturn laws against abortion or to liberalize laws regarding homosexuality, the traditional sensibilities of many of the world’s people are violated.
D’Souza’s ideas about Obama used to be considered conservative fanaticism. That no one is really talking about how extreme his sexist, racist and homophobic ideas are shows how extreme the right has become and how that extremism is now in the mainstream.
The film repeats what he wrote in the book and what he wrote in the Forbes piece. It was all but dismissed in those forms. But as a movie that can be sold to the heartland? It’s a major win for extremism and a win for D’Souza and his billionaire backers. But one can’t help but feel deflated in the wake of it. Probably, even with a second term, Obama will never escape the “ogga booga” man label. He’ll always be thought of as a radical even when he isn’t one. He’ll always be judged by his weird name and his Kenyan-born father.