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.

“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?

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

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.

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?

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.

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: