"Barack Obama's friend tried to kill my family."

The McCain campaign has released a statement from John M. Murtaugh, who as a child had his house firebombed by the Weather Underground and who links the group's founder, William Ayers, to Barack Obama.

In one of the starkest attacks we've seen this election, John M. Murtaugh, a lawyer and member of the city council in Yonkers, N.Y., recounts the attack on his father, who as a New York state judge presided over the trial of members of the Black Panther Party. In the early morning of Feb. 21, 1970, their house was targeted with two gasoline-filled firebombs at their front door and a third placed beneath the gas tank of their car.

He wrote a full account of the attack for City Journal in April, and says "there was never any doubt who was behind it" — the Weathermen, some of whom blew themselves up while trying to make bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse a few weeks later.

"The question remains: what did Obama know, and when did he know it?" Murtaugh asks in the statement released by the McCain campaign.

When Murtaugh starts doing television interviews, we'll know this story isn't going away.

— Stephen Dinan, national political correspondent, The Washington Times