Brown, Changing With The Weather

Could there be any candidate for Congress more phony than Senate candidate Scott Brown? Any one?

Debating incumbent Jeanne Shaheen on Tuesday night, Brown, who had moved to New Hampshire to run for the Senate, was asked by NBC's Chuck Todd why he is running in the Granite State after he lost his Massachusetts seat in 2012 to Democrat Elizabeth Warren.  The Concord Monitor reported

“Because I live here,” Brown said, explaining that his mother worked as a waitress on Hampton Beach and his father worked in the state as an airman. “I have long and strong ties. I’m running because I care about New Hampshire and care about restoring America. That’s why I’m running.”

The audience laughed, though far less than the candidate deserved.  Brown, who has run a commercial arguing that President Obama and Senator Shaheen "don't understand" the terrorist threat, was reminded by Todd that he had "suggested that the Islamic militant group ISIS could come across the U.S. border, in fact, saying that is, quote 'the most obvious pathway for terrorists to enter our country.'"  So Scott Brown was asked ” What is the evidence for that assertion? We've had terrorists come across the border, the north of the border. "

Brown responded "with respect, I did not say that. What I have said is that ISIS is real." Yet David Weigel points out that last month the Repub had claimed "these ISIS thugs have been saying for months that they’re going to send people here to kill Americans on as big a scale as they can, and never mind that a porous border is the most obvious pathway for terrorists to enter our country.”

Then there is climate change.  Grist's Ben Adler notes of Brown

During his 12 years in the Massachusetts state legislature, from 1998 to 2010, he voted for strong state limits on greenhouse gases and in favor of forming the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a carbon-trading system for Northeast states. In 2007, the Massachusetts Audubon Society gave him a perfect rating on its scorecard.

Soon afterward, unfortunately, Scott Brown became a Repub on the national stage and accepted gobs of money from the fossil fuel industry. He voted for oil subsidies and against higher fuel standards and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. As of his (losing) re-election campaign in 2012, he had whittled down his acceptance of scientific fact, maintaining "I do believe man plays a role." Two years later, he now denies climate change is scientifically proven.

When Lindsay Graham, stoking additional fear of ISIS, declares "this president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home," he appears almost to believe it.  Anyway, he's a Senator from South Carolina and may need to compensate for a suspected sexual orientation differing from the majority of his constituents.

However, Cosmo Scott (second and third photographs, below, from the AP) does not need to compensate, he's from the (relatively) liberal northeast, and he played a progressive previously.  Not so now, and the editors of Cosmopolitan magazine wrote in September, "Scott Brown may have been Cosmopolitan’s ‘sexiest man’ in 1982, but in 2014, we’re picking brains over brawn — and that’s Jeanne Shaheen,”

But Scott Brown, positioning himself between what he once was (or posed as) and what his party now demands, joining Chris Christie as a Repub who believes in nothing other than himself. Or as Adler figures, "either Scott Brown was lying in 2012, or he is lying now, or he doesn’t really believe in anything at all. (I’d put my money on the latter.) "

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