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Obama: he’s not heavy, he’s my half-brother — 16 Comments

1. Is this referring to when Obama said that during his visit to Beijing in 2009 when he met with Ndesandjo?

   If so, I think there’s a good chance it was a lie rather than just dismissing Ndesandjo because he was of no importance. Obama might have thought having a brother actually living in China could have some political negatives for him and so best to remove any idea of their being close.

2. He conveniently forgets quite a few family members. Perhaps because they know whatever secrets he’s gone to such lengths to hide.

3. To a prog, “truth” is what advances the cause, a “lie” is what hinders it. Since Ndesandjo could hinder the cause by telling everyone what a shit Barry is, it is “true” that the One never met his half-brother.

4. Obama engages in so much subvehiculation that Valerie Jarrett is probably inclined to tell her boss (paraphrasing Roy Scheider in “Jaws”), “You’re gonna need a bigger bus.”

5. Obama doesn’t impress me as being a guy who’s much interested in his rather extended family.

   That seems a valid conclusion. There was a similar story regarding the POTUS’s recollection of his interactions with his uncle in the Boston area. Such as the POTUS initially said he had barely met him,and then admits that yes, he had stayed with him for a few weeks when he first moved to the Boston area.

   I would make an addition to your statement: “Obama doesn’t impress me as being a guy who’s much interested in his rather extended family, except when they can be added to his narrative, such as being mentioned in his “memoirs.”

6. From Dreams From My Father:

   But only a few days later, Auma and I came home to find a car waiting for us outside the apartment. The driver, a brown-skinned man with a prominent Adam’s apple, handed Auma a note.
   “What is it?” I asked.
   “It’s an invitation from Ruth,” she said. “Mark’s back from America for the summer. She wants to have us over for lunch.”
   “Do you want to go?”
   Auma shook her head, a look of disgust on her face. “Ruth knows I’ve been here almost six months now. She doesn’t care about me. The only reason she’s invited us is because she’s curious about you. She wants to compare you to Mark.”
   “I think maybe I should go,” I said quietly.

   Auma looked at the note again, then handed it back to the driver and said something to him in Swahili. “We’ll both go,” she said, and walked into the apartment.

   Ruth lived in Westlands, an enclave of expensive homes set off by wide lawns and well-tended hedges, each one with a sentry post manned by brown-uniformed guards. …..
   We came to one of the more modest houses on the block and parked along the curve of a looping driveway. A white woman with a long jaw and graying hair came out of the house to meet us. Behind her was a black man of my height and complexion with a bushy Afro and horn-rimmed glasses.
   “Come in, come in,” Ruth said. The four of us shook hands stiffly and entered a large living room, where a balding, older black man in a safari jacket was bouncing a young boy on his lap. “This is my husband,” Ruth said, “and this is Mark’s little brother, Joey.”
   “Hey, Joey,” I said, bending down to shake his hand. He was a beautiful boy, with honey-colored skin and two front teeth missing. Ruth tousled the boy’s big curls, then looked at her husband and said, “Weren’t you two on your way to the club?”
   “Yes, yes,” the man said, standing up. “Come on, Joey…it was nice to meet you both.” The boy stood fast, staring up at Auma and me with a bright, curious smile until his father finally picked him up and carried him out the door.
   “Well, here we are,” Ruth said, leading us to the couch and pouring lemonade. “I must say it was quite a surprise to find out you were here, Barry. I told Mark that we just had to see how this other son of Obama’s turned out. Your name is Obama, isn’t it? But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?”
   I smiled as if I hadn’t understood the question. “So, Mark,” I said, turning to my brother, “I hear you’re at Berkeley.”
   “Stanford,” he corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. “I’m in my last year of the physics program there.”
   “It must be tough,” Auma offered.
   Mark shrugged. “Not really.”
   “Don’t be so modest, dear,” Ruth said. “The things Mark studies are so complicated only a handful of people really understand it all.” She patted Mark on the hand, then turned to me. “And Barry, I understand you’ll be going to Harvard. Just like Obama. You must have gotten some of his brains. Hopefully not the rest of him, though. You know Obama was quite crazy, don’t you? The drinking made it worse. Did you ever meet him? Obama, I mean?”
   “Only once. When I was ten.”
   “Well, you were lucky then. It probably explains why you’re doing so well.”
   That’s how the next hour passed, with Ruth alternating between stories of my father’s failure and stories of Mark’s accomplishments. Any questions were directed exclusively to me, leaving Auma to fiddle silently with Ruth’s lasagna.
   I wanted to leave as soon as the meal was over, but Ruth suggested that Mark show us the family album while she brought out the dessert.
   “I’m sure they’re not interested, Mother,” Mark said.
   “Of course they’re interested,” Ruth said. Then, her voice oddly distant: “There are pictures of Obama. From when he was young….”
   We followed Mark to the bookcase, and he pulled down a large photo album. Together we sat on the couch, slowly thumbing through laminate pages. Auma and Roy, dark and skinny and tall, all legs and big eyes, holding the two smaller children protectively in their arms. The Old Man and Ruth mugging it up at a beach somewhere. The entire family dressed up for a night out on the town. They were happy scenes, all of them, and all strangely familiar, as if I were glimpsing some alternative universe that had played itself out behind my back. They were reflections, I realized, of my own long-held fantasies, fantasies that I’d kept secret even from myself. The fantasy of the Old Man’s having taken my mother and me back with him to Kenya. The wish that my mother and father, sisters and brothers, were all under one roof. Here it was, I thought, what might have been. And the recognition of how wrong it had all turned out, the harsh evidence of life as it had really been lived, made me so sad that after only a few minutes I had to look away.
   On the drive back, I apologized to Auma for having put her through the ordeal. She waved it off.
   “It could have been worse,” she said. “I feel sorry for Mark, though. He seems so alone. You know, it’s not easy being a mixed child in Kenya.”
   I looked out the window, thinking about my mother, Toot, and Gramps, and how grateful I was to them-for who they were, and for the stories they’d told. I turned back to Auma, and said, “She still hasn’t gotten over him, has she?”
   “Who?”
   “Ruth. She hasn’t gotten over the Old Man.”
   Auma thought for a moment. “No, Barack. I guess she hasn’t. Just like the rest of us.”

   Methinks we should be very careful about claiming that Obama said he met his half-brother only once.

   [I didn’t provide a link because I had downloaded it years ago and lost the link]

7. If Obama had a son, he would look like him.

8. Gringo:

   That’s quite a passage from the book. Both interesting and puzzling. It sounds as though Barack Obama (Jr.) was envious of his brother Mark for having lived with their father.

   Here’s the whole interview with Mark. It sheds some light on the whole thing:

9. Iapologize for not having read the link that Ann provided in the first comment before posting on Dreams From My Father.

   President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he met briefly with a half brother who lives in China and who recently wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about the abusive Kenyan father they share.

   Obama, who spent three days in China during his first official tour of Asia, acknowledged the meeting in an interview with CNN. He offered no details. An aide said later that the meeting took place Monday night after Obama arrived in Beijing, the Chinese capital……
   “I don’t know him well. I met him for the first time a couple of years ago,” Obama told CNN. “He stopped by with his wife for about five minutes during the trip.

   To quote that SC Congressman, “YOU LIE”– if what the POTUS wrote in Dreams From My Father were true.

   If the POTUS were telling the truth about meeting his half brother Mark for the first time several years ago in China, this can mean several things. It can mean that while Barack Obama did meet his half brother Mark in Kenya, the POTUS cannot remember what HE WROTE in Dreams From My Father. I find this highly implausible, if Obama himself wrote Dreams, and wrote the truth in Dreams. Generally, if you write about something, you are more likely to remember it. Or did Obama not remember meeting Mark because he never met him in Kenya? Because Dreams was ghostwritten, and because Dreams was in part fiction? To put in bluntly- or because Dreams lied about Barack Obama meeting his half brother Mark? Or because Barack Obama wrote Dreams, but lied about meeting Mark?

   I am reminded of the sports celebrity who denied something that was related in his “autobiography.” Granted, the “autobiography” of the sports celebrity was openly ghostwritten- Jerry De Jock with Sammy Sportswriter. You know the type. But didn’t the ghostwriter at least go over with Jerry De Jock what he had written? And wasn’t what Sammy Sportswriter wrote based on taped conversations with Jerry de Jock?

   If Barack Obama cannot remember having met his half brother Mark in Kenya, an event described in Dreams, this leads credence to what Jack Cashill and others have been saying about Dreams- that it was ghostwritten.

   What I have read about the “ghostwriting” claims stated that the ghostwriting involved Bill Ayers organizing all the notes that Barack Obama had written. This incident of Barack Obama not remembering meeting his half brother Mark in Kenya leads me to suspect that Bill Ayers- or whoever the ghostwriter was- also added some fictitious events to Dreams.

   Which is not a surprise. After all, we already know that names are changed in Dreams and there are composite characters in Dreams.

   One more example of Barack Obama being a serial liar, it would appear.

10. Gringo:

    If you listen to the interview with Mark, you’ll see that he describes his new book as correcting some of the record involving his family that Barack Obama wrote about in Dreams From My Father. It would be very interesting to compare the two, wouldn’t it?

11. Ndesandjo will not be thrown under a bus; look for a fiery airplane crash at BCIA.

12. Interesting that Ndesandjo’s book is being self-published.

13. In the Ingram interview, half-brother Mark talks of he and Barack being Siamese twins, of having different perspectives. This shows in the meeting Barack and Mark had in Kenya. Having had minimal to no experience with the Kenyan side of his family, Barack Obama went to Kenya to embrace his Kenyan side. He found out that half-brother Mark had a different perspective.Having lived most of his childhood in Kenya, with an abusive Kenyan father, Mark was ready to leave Kenya behind and embrace his American side. Link for Audacity and for Dreams: pages 184-185:

    The following week, I called Mark and suggested that we go out to lunch. He seemed a bit hesitant, but eventually agreed to meet me at an Indian restaurant downtown. He was more relaxed than he had been during our first meeting, making a few self-deprecatory jokes, offering his observations about California and academic infighting. As the meal wore on, I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.
    “Fine,” he said. “It’s nice to see my mom and dad, of course. And Joey-he’s really a great kid.” Mark cut off a bite of his samosa and put it into his mouth. “As for the rest of Kenya, I don’t feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.”
    “You don’t ever think about settling here?”
    Mark took a sip from his Coke. “No,” he said. “I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.”
    I should have stopped then, but something-the certainty in this brother’s voice, maybe, or our rough resemblance, like looking into a foggy mirror-made me want to push harder. I asked, “Don’t you ever feel like you might be losing something?”
    Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.
    “I understand what you’re getting at,” he said flatly. “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing.” He wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his plate. “Well, you’re right. At a certain point, I made a decision not to think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.”
    “It made you mad.”
    “Not mad. Just numb.”
    “And that doesn’t bother you? Being numb, I mean?”
    “Towards him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know-it’s not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I should and shouldn’t care about? Understand, I’m not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don’t ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if I looked more carefully at myself, I would…”
    For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.
    “Who knows?” he said. “What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress. Life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.”
    We stood up to leave, and I insisted on paying the bill. Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache. When I got home, I told Auma how the meeting had gone. She looked away for a moment, then broke out with a short, bitter laugh.
    “What’s so funny?”
    “I was just thinking about how life is so strange. You know, as soon as the Old Man died, the lawyers contacted all those who might have a claim to the inheritance. Unlike my mum, Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark’s father was. So of all of the Old Man’s kids, Mark’s claim is the only one that’s uncontested.”
    Again Auma laughed, and I looked up at the picture hanging on her wall, the same picture pasted inside Ruth’s album, of three brothers and a sister, smiling sweetly for the camera.

    In the interview, either Mark or Laura speak of Barack having a reason for not liking having the book come out- Mark is trying to horn in on his half brother’s fame. I suspect there is an additional reason: Barack doesn’t like having anything he wrote in Dreams to be corrected. Which may be why he jumped the gun and said he had met Mark for the first time in China- Freudian slip. He wished away his having met Mark in Kenya.

    Interesting line: “with a dishonesty that made my heart ache.”
    Sometimes even a serial liar fesses up, albeit unintentionally.

14. The Grass is always greener on the other side.

    Human flaws will never cease. Well, the only thing that can be said for that is at least you not a zombie.

15. The question is: WHERE did the POTUS state he had met his half brother Mark ONLY ONCE?
    A repeat quote from my comment from January 3rd, 2014 at 10:48 pm. The POTUS is talking in 2009 about meeting half brother Mark in China that year:

    “I don’t know him well. I met him for the first time a couple of years ago,” Obama told CNN. “He stopped by with his wife for about five minutes during the trip.

    So here the POTUS states he had met his half brother Mark more than once. The “first time” would have been in Kenya, as recounted in Dreams. WHERE did the POTUS state he had met his half brother Mark ONLY ONCE?

16. Gringo:

    Mark didn’t say that they had met only once prior to 2009 (nor did I say it in my post). Barack Obama didn’t say it, either.

    What Obama did say in 2009, and what Mark was objecting to, was that their first meeting had occurred “just a few years ago.” But actually they had first met over twenty years earlier when they were both very young men, in 1988 in Kenya (the meeting that is described in Barack Obama’s Dreams).

    And they had met many times since. So it’s odd that in 2009 Obama was acting as though they barely knew each other, and as though their first meeting had occurred just a couple of years before 2009. “A few years ago” was NOT the first time they had met, and they knew each other fairly well already by “a few years ago,” although not as well as half-brothers who were raised together or near each other would have, of course. And as you can see from Dreams, Barack O. had had a fairly complex and intense reaction to meeting Mark back in the 80s.

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