As you'll see, this is a pretty funny claim from National Republican Senatorial Committee communications director Brad Dayspring:
By way of background, Gabriel Gomez is the GOP nominee and Ed Markey is the Democratic nominee in the June 25 special election for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. It's starting out as a tight race—today PPP
released a poll showing Markey leading by just four points. Yesterday, Markey's campaign
released a video featuring a clip of Gomez making a television appearance as a spokesman for OpSec, the GOP-aligned group of right-wing veterans who
tried to swiftboat President Obama over Osama bin Laden and Benghazi.
To be honest, Markey's video wasn't that great, but it nonetheless raised a persuasive criticism of Gomez: That while he is claiming to be a "new" kind of Republican, his affiliation with swiftboaters shows he's just another typical GOP hack. Certainly, if I were on the GOP side, I wouldn't be calling any attention to it, but that's exactly what Dayspring did in his tweet.
Specifically, he claimed it was "ugly" for Markey to feature a split screen of Gomez and bin Laden. If the purpose of the split screen had been to suggest Gomez was sympathetic to bin Laden—something along the lines of what Saxby Chambliss did to Max Cleland—it would have been outrageous. But that's not at all what was happening.
Far from comparing Gomez to bin Laden, Markey's campaign was simply playing a clip from the video that Gomez had appeared on television to defend. It was Gomez's video that included images of bin Laden, so the "ugly" split screen of bin Laden was actually nothing more than juxtaposing Gomez with the video that he had appeared on television to defend. Follow below the fold to see the image—and one from the very same video of Gomez split screened with President Obama.
Here's what Dayspring called "ugly":
That's hardly a Chambliss-esque slur against Gomez. The video wasn't trying to compare Gomez and bin Laden—it was simply playing a clip from the video that Gomez had appeared on television to defend. And five seconds earlier, that same clip included an image of President Obama, leading to this split screen:
So if the first split screen was ugly, then what about the second? Is the NRSC communications director going to accuse Markey of implying that Gomez endorsed Obama, or that Obama endorsed Gomez? Of course not, because that would be ridiculous. But it would be no more ridiculous than whining about a Gomez-bin Laden split screen.
But the best part of this is that before Dayspring (along with another GOP operative) started tweeting about this video, I had no idea that Gomez had been a part of the effort to swiftboat Obama over Osama bin Laden. So in a weird way, I guess the Markey campaign owes them a debt of gratitude for helping to get their message out. Let's hope they don't spend the next seven weeks relying on Republicans for communications help, however. Ed Markey would be a damn good senator. It would be a shame for his campaign to blow his shot.