Victim of Weatherman terror has questions for Obama

Maggie Gallagher:

WHEN John Murtagh was 9 years old, Bill Ayers' friends tried to kill him.

"I remember my mother's pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn't leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside," wrote Murtagh recently in City Journal.

It wasn't personal. John's dad was a judge presiding over a trial of some Black Panthers. John still remembers the red graffiti on the sidewalk the next morning: "Free the Panther 21; The Viet Cong Have Won; Kill the Pigs."

As best he recalls, Bernardine Dohrn, who's now Ayers' wife, first claimed credit for bombing John's home in 1970.

John Murtagh is a now lawyer and Yonkers city councilman running for the state Senate on the GOP ticket. I reached him this week through his campaign. It wasn't hard.

Has Barack Obama ever tried?

Obama was only 8 when Murtagh's house was bombed. He has nothing to do with the trauma the Murtagh family went through. But Obama was a grown man when he decided his path to power lay through Bill Ayers' connections.

In the Chicago establishment, which embraced former terrorists like Ayers and his wife, Obama was encouraged to look beyond the obvious - the lawlessness, the attacks on cops, judges, army outposts - to embrace larger goals.

What were these goals? How does Obama come to continue to associate with Ayers - a man who can't bring himself to say to John Murtagh or to John's mother or any other kin of the attacked: I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was a terrible thing to do.

Obama's campaign is busy fudging. His top political adviser claims Obama just didn't know Ayers' history when they first met. Bomber? What bomber? Right.

"If that's true, Obama has to be the dumbest man who ever graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School," snorts Murtagh. "I don't buy that at all."

Murtagh believes the relationship between the Obamas, Ayers and Dohrn goes back 30 years, to Michelle Obama's time at Sidley Austin, a law firm that also employed Dohrn.

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It was probably more like 20 to 25 years since the Obamas would have been teenagers 30 years ago. That does not invalidate his point. I also find it incredible that Obama did not know Ayers background. He would have to be one of the least curious person in the world not to know. He would have to ignore the Chicago media which talked abut it in the run up to the 96 election.

I also find it not credible that Obama thought Ayers acts were despicable. If he really thought that, how could he continue to associate with him? Why would he want to around him at all? Again, did Obama ever tell Ayers what he thought of his actions?