In the wake of Sen. Scott Brown's juvenile attack on Elizabeth Warren's looks, it seems that Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Sen. Susan Collins drew the GOP damage control short straws to defend Sen. Centerfold.

From Sen. Ayotte:

"I know Scott Brown’s story, and I know that he had many obstacles to overcome in his youth," Ayotte said. "It’s inappropriate to make light of his personal circumstances, or to disparage or belittle him for the decisions he made to improve his life.

Wow. That sounds like it was truly from the heart. Or totally cribbed from Brown's campaign manager's statement:

"It’s elitist of Professor Warren to look down at the decisions Scott Brown made to put himself through college and rise above the circumstances of his life. Scott has fought and scraped for everything he’s got."

As for Collins, she went with:

... saying Brown was "merely responding" to comments first made by the Harvard professor, in which she "made light of the difficult choices in his life ..."

But leaving aside Ayotte very nearly plagiarizing the official Brown response and Collins' failure to add "like a jackass" to "merely responding," really? Collins and Ayotte sacrificed their self-respect on the Republican altar of purity for Scott Brown? The self-described graduate of the "school of hard knocks"—more commonly known as being a frat boy at Tufts University—who stripped down for a thousand bucks as a 22-year old "youth," and they're going to turn it into a story of triumph over adversity? Pathetic.

But not nearly as pathetic as agreeing to attack Warren for managing to get an education while fully-clothed ... all to defend Brown's snide dismissal of a woman's worth based on her looks.