A new low, even for Sean Hannity

The other day Sean Hannity hosted a fair, balanced program on Fox News entitled Obama and Friends: The History of Radicalism. The "expert" who appeared on the show was Andy Martin, once known as Anthony Martin-Trigona. Want to know something about Andy? Read what salon.com's Glenn Greenwald knows about him:

First, a bit of background: in the 1980s and 1990s, Anthony Martin-Trigona was well-known to New York litigators as a source of warped entertainment, wonderment and universal disgust.

For years, Martin-Trigona ran around continuously suing so many random people on a pro se basis -- and when he would lose, he would then sue the lawyers who represented the parties he sued and the judges who ruled against him -- that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals actually barred him from commencing any further judicial process without prior authorization, an unprecedented and truly extraordinary order. Martin-Trigona would file so many new, rambling lawsuits and motions on a virtually daily basis that, as the Second Circuit pointed out, it actually became impossible for courts even to process: "Martin-Trigona's voluminous filings have 'inundated' the District of Connecticut and his activities have burdened judicial operations to the point of impairing the administration of justice."

It wasn't just the quantity but the content that made his litigious behavior so notable. The documents he filed were routinely filled with the most extreme anti-Semitic venom one could find anywhere this side of Mein Kampf. The lawsuits were often based on the theory that a cabal of Jewish judges, lawyers and government officials were conspiring against him, and the Complaints he filed would be filled with artfully-constructed allegations along these lines:

Paragraph 8: On July 12, 1988, the plaintiff-Jew met with aforementioned Jew lawyer to prepare for hearing with the Jew judge.

That's a paraphrase from memory, but it's a quite accurate illustration of what his documents routinely contained. In 1986, he ran for Congress in Illinois under this campaign committee: "The Anthony R. Martin-Trigona Congressional Campaign to Exterminate Jew Power in America," and he wrote sympathetically of the Holocaust. As The Washington Post stated:

In a New York bankruptcy case, he referred to a judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew." During the bankruptcy dispute, he filed a civil-rights lawsuit claiming Jewish bankruptcy judges and lawyers were conspiring to steal his property. He asked a court to bar "any Jew from having anything to do with plaintiff's property."

In another motion in the case, he wrote: "I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property."

After the mid-1990s, Martin-Trigona re-surfaced in Florida with a name change ("Andy Martin"), ran for public office multiple times as a Republican (even the local GOP repudiated him), then became a vocal supporter of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign, and finally an obsessive "investigator" of Barack Obama. According to the New York Times, Martin "is credited as being among the first -- if not the first -- to assert in a chain e-mail message that Mr. Obama was secretly a Muslim."

In other words, Sean Hannity's source, the man claiming that Obama is a dangerous Muslim, is himself a certifiably insane anti-Semite. Obviously, Fox News viewers weren't notified of this guy's background. He was identified on screen as ANDY MARTIN: AUTHOR & JOURNALIST. Good ol' Andy, just authorin' and journalistin', gonna tell us about scary Barack Obama.

When Sean Hannity was called on this, he said something like "What, as a journalist I can't interview someone I disagree with?" First of all, Sean Hannity is a journalist like I'm a marathon runner. He didn't interview Andy Martin, he made him the centerpiece of an hour-long smear campaign. Suck one, Sean.