A fountainhead of lies -- the man behind the email rumors

You've read his words, echoed across the internet in email chain letters making outrageous claims about Barack Obama. Before that, you may have come across similarly outrageous claims from him about George W. Bush. He claims he's not an anti-semite, yet 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.”

He's filed so many lawsuits in federal court that he has been banned from filing any more without prior permission.

He's run for office in three states and for US president twice.

He graduated law school but was blocked from the Illinois bar because a psychiatric evaluation found him he was afflicted by a "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Yet he was recently featured in a segment in a Fox News documentary filled with outrageous and provably false claims about Barack Obama, including claims that Obama had trained to overthrow the United States -- assertions which were presented in the documentary as though they were the fact-based views of a reliable expert.

He is Andy Martin, founder and owner of FreeRepublic.com, a conservative website filled with more than vaguely anti-semitic rants, bizarre claims about various political figures from Obama to Bush, and the rantings of its colorful, 62 year old owner.

The New York Times tracks down the facts and probes the background of a key source and guest for Fox News shows and the original source for many of the false rumors about the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, in in Jim Rutenberg's article The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama.