Scott Brown adds another line to his resume

Sen. Scott Brown is a very important man, and at Thursday night's debate with Elizabeth Warren, he added another resume item you might not have known about. Not only does Brown meet secretly with kings and queens, not only does Secretary of State Hillary Clinton call him all the time, but he's also "one of the ranking members on the Armed Services Committee."

This has the benefit of being a step or two closer to the truth than his claim that Hillary Clinton calls him "all the time" when they'd spoken twice, and not in more than a year. But a step or two closer to the truth still puts it about five steps from reality. There's one ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and that's John McCain. You'd have to spread the idea of ranking members, plural, pretty thin to get to Scott Brown, who is the sixth Republican member on the committee.

Brown is the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Airland, but with 68 subcommittees in the Senate as a whole, being a subcommittee ranking member is not exactly a unique identifier. In fact, members ranked below Brown on the committee structure, like New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte and Ohio's Rob Portman, are also subcommittee chairs. So if Brown, everyone above him in the Armed Services Committee structure, and all of the subcommittee ranking members are "one of the ranking members," then nine out of 12 Republicans on the committee fit that bill.

As Charles Pierce writes:

In the event that John McCain, Jim Inhofe, Jeff Sessions, Saxby Chambliss, and Roger Wicker all move to Guam to launch new careers as a pick-up basketball team, Scott Brown would be chairman. This may seem like a minor thing, but if Brown is going to make a meal out of Warren's alleged "character" issue regarding her ancestry, then his tendency to aggrandize his place in history ought also to be somewhere on the table.

No kidding. Brown started the debate by accusing Elizabeth Warren of exaggerating about one thing in a way that supposedly cast question on her character'then continued his own established pattern of puffing himself up. And he's trying to run as a guy who should get your vote because he's so down to earth and just plain nice?

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