Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Andy Martin: ally of the Right, FOX TV guest, anti-semite loon

Andy Martin specializes in generating lies about Obama that the Right likes to hear - and repeat.

FOX TV, in particular, has been a great repeater. Palin/McCain have played on those lies when it served them. Their supporters scream them aloud; they believe what they see on FOX TV and hear on talk radio.

Today the NYT tells us where the lies come from. They also expose FOX TV for what it is -- a curse upon America and an enemy of the enlightenment. Emphases mine.
The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama - NYTimes.com

October 13, 2008
By JIM RUTENBERG

... an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

... The CBS News program "48 Hours" in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, "See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits," to what it called his prolific filings. (Mr. Martin has also been known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation....

...Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin...

... Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam...

Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry... Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”

Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists...

... Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”...
Mr. Martin has been a darling of the whacko Right, but politically he's an anti-semitic loon. He in turn inspired Mr. Corsi, who became wealthy writing a book of lies popular with the Right. Sampley, another talk radio favorite, keys off Martin as well.

So Martin, Corsi, and Sampley are Obama's enemies. I think that's reason alone to support Obama.

The great irony of course, is that the ravings of a pro-Holocaust anti-semite should find a credulous audience with some American Jews. I'm hoping this superb NYT article will help with that particular problem.

2 comments:

Brett said...

I noticed in that story he has been both a Democrat and Republican, trashing people on both sides of the aisle. I think that gives a convenient insight into the bubbling lunacy in his head. It was like he was trying to test the waters and see who he could make most irate and outraged.

If I were you I wouldn't worry about him. People of all political persuasions laugh at folks like this. Unfortunately the name of the game is ratings, and stations can make money by putting contraversially psychotic people on.

"Once trained to overthrow the government." I mean really. Anybody who would believe that vomit wouldn't have voted for him anyway.

JGF said...

Yes, and he's probably been a Naderite too.

I was careful to say "ally of the right" because the Right fell for his drivel -- big time. So I disagree we shouldn't worry about him, he was incredibly successful. Look at the best seller that draws from his work.

He has been a very powerful and influential figure, and he's not done yet.

We absolutely need to expose him, not assume he'll go away. The Swift Boaters were almost as loony, and they succeeded. Oh, did they succeed.

Never again can we ignore loons like Martin. The American people fall for them.