Joe McCarthy’s America
Andy Martin in a 2006 file photo
“I don’t pretend to be an exclusively fact-based reporter, though I try as hard as I can to get the facts.”
– Andy Martin
Suppose you were a television executive putting together a “documentary” on Democrat Barack Obama. Would you base a big part of your production on assertions made by Andy Martin?
Fox News Channel did on Sunday.
The program, aired as part of conservative commentator Sean Hannity’s “Hannity’s America,” was entitled “Barack and Friends: The history of radicalism.” It purported to provide “exclusive information, never revealed before, about (Mr. Obama’s) ties to controversial people and radical groups.” Sifting through the transcript, however, we found less new information than slurs and smears that have circulated anonymously on the Internet.
One of the program’s main sources was a perennial political candidate named Andy Martin. In 2006, when he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate, Mr. Martin was among the first to claim that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim.
Mr. Martin’s campaigns — he has run for office as both a Republican and a Democrat, in Connecticut, Illinois and Florida — have been marked by bizarre allegations, barrages of e-mail press releases and frequent threats of litigation.
During Sunday evening’s prime time Fox telecast, Mr. Martin offered what he modestly described as his “expert opinion” that Mr. Obama was groomed to run for higher office by Bill Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground group who is now an education professor in Chicago.
Mr. Ayers is a big admirer of Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezeulan President Hugo Chavez, Mr. Martin claimed. “We are basically in the throes of a social revolution which attempts to essentially freeze out anyone who is not part of this radical ideology,” he said.
Based on Mr. Martin’s record, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of a man who was denied a law license, sanctioned by a federal court for filing frivolous lawsuits against people he thought had wronged him, and expressed virulent anti-Semitism.
When Mr. Martin ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1986, the Chicago Tribune has reported, the name of his campaign committee included the phrase “to exterminate Jew power in America.”
In a 1983 personal bankruptcy case, he called a federal judge a “crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.” In a related filing, the Tribune reported, he expressed sympathy for Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust.
Although he graduated from the University of Illinois law school, Mr. Martin was denied a law license in 1973 because of “issues raised as to (Martin’s) mental stability.” Among them was his Selective Service record, showing that the man who then went by the name Anthony R. Martin-Trigona had “a moderately-severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”
Among the evidence cited to deny his admission to the bar was a petition filed by Mr. Martin asking that a parking ticket be thrown out because it was “entered by an insane judge,” and his description of an attorney as “shaking and tottering and drooling like an idiot.”
Mr. Martin has been sanctioned by a federal court for filing “vexatious, frivolous and scandalous” law suits. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said his frequent suits seemed designed to “harass persons who have unluckily crossed his path.”
During his 2006 campaign alone, Mr. Martin threatened to sue the Chicago Tribune for publishing a poll showing he had support from less than 1 percent of Republican voters. And he sued WBBM-Channel 2 in Chicago when it refused to include him in a televised debate.
It’s possible, of course, than even someone as deeply flawed as Andy Martin can be right on an issue. But the odds don’t favor it.
Responsible journalists would likely be as interested in Mr. Martin’s evidence as his spectacular charges. But not Fox News Channel. It’s Sunday’s broadcast was heavy on the innuendo and smear, light on the factual basis for charges made by Mr. Martin and other so-called experts.
That’s the way things used to work back in the day, when the late Sen. Joseph “Tail Gunner Joe” McCarthy used innuendo and smears to intimidate witnesses and cow the national press. Apparently, that’s still the way things work in Sean Hannity’s America.
John G. Carlton is an editorial writer who covers health care, science, the environment and public utilities. Before joining the editorial page, "Doc" was the newspaper's medical writer for four years. He has also worked at newspapers in Connecticut and New York. He's fond of heavy sarcasm and light anti-tank weapons. He lives in west St. Louis County with his wife, Martha Madigan, their daughter Ana and an overly enthusiastic Australian Shepherd dog, Savannah. 
Gee, the Post is attacking Fox News Channel and defending Obama. Who would have predicted such a thing?