I noted yesterday that Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's response to the State of the Union last night sought to cast Massachusetts senator-elect and waterboarding supporter Scott Brown as the new face of the Republican Party's torture wing. McDonnell said, "As Senator-elect Scott Brown says, we should be spending taxpayer dollars to defeat terrorists, not to protect them."
While reading Adam Blickstein's thorough debunking of the new web ad from Liz Cheney's Keep America Safe group (which he aptly refers to as "Keep America Afraid"), I noticed that the ad itself quotes Brown verbatim, just as McDonnell did. Take a look, starting at 49 seconds in:
Even the Cheneys are now outsourcing their anti-due process rhetoric to Brown, the GOP's new crown prince of torture. As I said yesterday, it's one thing to have someone who's the butt of Darth Vader jokes be the face of torture -- better to have someone like a popular new senator with the sunny grin of a former Cosmo centerfold.
-- A. Serwer
