NYT: The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama

[kpete]

Hannity Meets His Equal

With an organization as corrupt as Fox News, it's difficult for anything to really surprise or outrage. But this is one of those exceptions. The guy who is the point of origin of most of the Obama email smears is a rather exotic and peripatetic character named Andy Martin. I suppose like every other news organization we've been getting his daily dispatches for more than a year. On Sean Hannity's recent smear documentary on Barack Obama, Fox had on Martin and allowed him to assert, unchallenged, that Obama "had once trained to overthrow the US government." The Times profiles Martin in this article.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/236561.php

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama
By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: October 12, 2008

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that arguably set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: "Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion."

.....The press release was picked up by the conservative FreeRepublic.com Web site and spread virally and steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and, ultimately, books.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyber-whisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs where he is a bête noir.

But 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 Fox program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13martin.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[Trajan]

1. LMFAO to the perfect description of a Freeper ...

“moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Priceless .....

(WTF is ideation ?)

Ah .. Found it:

"A psychological state in which an individual generates alternate scenarios, creates fantasy worlds, or otherwise imagines things in a way that may contradict external reality. In this context, ideation may be considered constructive or escapist, creative or destructive, depending on the lens through which this state of mind is being observed." - Wikipedia

[elleng]

2. Thanks for this,

and thanks to the Times.


"In such a momentous election — with two wars, a financial meltdown and a stalling economy — The Times owes readers much more help than it has given them to understand what the candidates propose to do and how that squares with reality."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12pubed.html?pagewanted=2

[PatGund]

3. Well....

Famous Anti-Semite Andy Martin did say things like:

"Hitler's troubled family life and psyche? Adolph meet Barack. Philandering father Barack-from-Kenya impregnates impressionable girl from Kansas-Washington-Hawaii, most likely without benefit of clergy. Father moves on and leaves a wound in his son's life. The son reverses field and receives "dreams from his father," instead of nightmares. Fantasy reigns."

and

'His father was a rake who never married his mother, and his mother showed abysmally poor judgment in being impregnated by a married man. Hardly a 'strong family' and certainly not 'strong values.' Quite the contrary. Shameful values is more like it.
"His mother was promiscuous and had a child out of wedlock, in 1961, when that was still scandalous behavior. Is this Obama's idea of 'family values?' Obviously, he has been deceiving the American people and hoping his advertising lies could overcome the truth. He has failed.

So yeah, he's perfect for Faux