One of the biggest obstacles facing Obama’s political campaign has little to do with his tax plan or foreign policy. What plagues Obama is a persistent rumor that he is a Muslim and lying about it. Ever heard it?
 

This falsehood has followed Obama since 2004 when it was found in a press release and spawned a cyber phenomenon. While everyone has heard the claim, few people have heard of the man behind it. Allow me to introduce Andy Martin.

Martin, 62, graduated from the University of Illinois and then went on to earn his law degree from the same school. However, he never actually received a license to practice law due in part to a state psychiatrist’s evaluation of him as possessing a “moderately severe character defect manifest by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.” Since then, Martin has mostly been known for filing piles and piles of lawsuits, unsuccessfully running for office under both parties and spouting anti-Semitic comments, including saying in a motion that “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”
 

So why are we talking about this beacon of morality now? You can thank Fox News for that one. A documentary on the channel allowed Martin to freely expound on Obama falsehoods, such as that he once trained to overthrow the government.
 

Unfortunately, even though Martin’s assertions are mainly crazytalk upon examination, The New York Times explains how they have spread so far:

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.

“What he’s generating gets picked up in other places,” said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins, “and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”

Speaking of rumors and claims, I guess we should really blame this on Al Gore then. He did invent the Internet.