Hitting back hard at John McCain's last-minute smears and lies, Barack Obama's campaign is releasing a documentary detailing John McCain's involvement in the Keating Five scandal.

From the AP: "Rep. Rahm Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat and Obama supporter, warned against McCain's strategy. 'If we are going to go down this road, you know, Barack Obama was eight years old, somehow responsible for Bill Ayers,' he said. 'At 58, John McCain was associating with Charles Keating.'"

Emanuel is known as Rahmbo for his aggressive style that vis a vis Karl Rove uses facts against his political enemies.

These guys fight back. To paraphrase Sidney Blumenthal: Barack is from the toughest neighborhood in New York: Chicago.

From the Obama campaign:

Over the weekend, John McCain's top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and 'turn the page to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama.

In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.

But it's not just McCain's role in the current crisis that they're avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.

During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings.

Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion. Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee.

The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain's Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts -- and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain.

So at noon Eastern on Monday, October 6th, we're releasing a 13-minute documentary about the scandal called "Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis" -- it will be available at KeatingEconomics.com, along with background information that every voter should know.

... The point of the film and the web site is that John McCain still hasn't learned his lesson. And this time, McCain's bankrupt economic philosophy has put our economy at the brink of collapse and put millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes.

Watch the video to see why John McCain's failed philosophy and poor judgment is a recipe for deepening the crisis: http://my.barackobama.com/keatingvideo

It's no wonder John McCain would rather spend the last month of this election smearing Barack's character instead of talking about the top priority issue for voters. But if we work together, we can make sure the focus stays on the economy -- and how to fix it.