RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2017, David Garrow’s carefully researched Obama biography, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, appeared to much less fanfare than it deserved.  The media undoubtedly downplayed it because it offered the truth behind many of Obama’s self-adulatory inventions, and Trump’s new presidency occupied everyone’s energy.  What makes the book newsworthy today is that David Samuels has interviewed Garrow and revisited narratives in the book, reminding everyone of the scary, power-obsessed nastiness behind Obama’s carefully built façade.

The interview on Tablet is long and worth every second it takes you to read it.  However, I’ve summarized below some of the highlights.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his breakup with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a scholar known for her meticulous, honest research.  According to Obama, they broke up because after seeing a play by August Wilson, a black writer, Obama suddenly gained a black consciousness that Jager refused to recognize or understand.

However, Garrow, unlike other journalists in America, interviewed Jager for her side of the story.  It was quite different.

Image: Barack Obama. YouTube screen grab (cropped).

Jager said that they broke up because they went to see an exhibit about Adolf Eichman’s 1961 trial at the same time that Steve Cokely had accused Chicago’s Jewish doctors of giving black babies AIDS.  Jager, whose grandparents were honored as Righteous Gentiles for saving Jews during WWII, broke up with Obama because he refused to denounce anti-Semitism.  Considering Obama’s open hostility to Israel and later palling around with famous anti-Semites (e.g., Rev. Wright, Obama’s infamous and still hidden tape at a pro-PLO dinner, and Obama’s photo with Farrakhan), her version rings true.

Another revelation was that Obama fantasized about sodomy with men, which would seem to support the many rumors about his sexuality.

When Garrow interviewed Obama over the course of eight hours, Obama impressed Garrow with his focus on the “hilariously inconsequential,” such as insisting that he spoke fluent Indonesian in third grade.

When Garrow spoke with Bob Bauer, Obama’s lawyer, to ensure that he was correctly stating things Obama had told him, Bauer told Garrow something very unusual, considering the book that launched Obama’s career:

My clearest memory, and there’s nothing officially off the record with Bob, so I think I can say this, and boy, it’s the clearest thing I remember of all my conversations with Bob. … This is close to a quote: “Whatever you do, don’t ask him about his father.”

Samuels noted how odd this was from the author of Dreams from My Father, eliciting from Garrow this stunning statement about a man he’d spoken with personally and whose life he explored in detail: “He’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”

The interview expands on the letters Alex McNear, Obama’s girlfriend in college, received from Obama.  As noted above, it was in those letters that Obama fantasized about sodomy.  The passage in the interview about those letters is striking because they reveal that Obama was a narcissist, someone who used people but never connected with them.  (The bolded passage is Samuel’s question):

Barack’s love letters to Alex, if they are actually love letters, are hard to read. Not just because they’re so poorly written, but because of the clear lack of any human interest in the person he’s writing to. The letters are completely performative. She may as well have been a tree or some kind of theater backdrop. Maybe all young men are guilty of this fault, but these examples seem pretty egregious.

It’s pretty clear to me, and this is me putting little pieces together with Alex and with Sheila, but I’m 97 percent convinced that Barack either drafted all those letters in his journal and then made them into letters, or he wrote the letters and then copied them into the journal.

According to Garrow, Obama has always kept journals that he will deep-six forever.  Why?  Because “[h]e wants people to believe his story.  For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction — oh, God, did that infuriate him.”

There’s so much more, and every bit of it is worth reading because it reveals who Obama is and what the mainstream media assiduously ignored and, therefore, hid from the American public.  All this still matters, by the way.  There’s good reason to believe that Obama, who refused to leave D.C. after his presidency ended (a norm-busting decision that Samuels describes in detail), is calling the shots in the ostensible Biden presidency.

Additionally, as increasing numbers of people fear, there’s a good possibility that, when Biden is pushed out of the campaign, Michelle Obama will be substituted as the Democrat candidate — and she is still considered one of the most popular people in America, especially among two passionate voting demographics — namely, black and white women.