We've learned a lot of scary stuff about Massachusetts Senate candidate Scott Brown in the past 10 days.

Leaders of the "birther" movement that has sought to discredit President Barack Obama's status as an American citizen are defending Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown's suggestion that Obama was born out of wedlock.

Andy Martin, a right-wing polemicist and perennial vanity candidate who claims on the front page of his blog that Obama's real father was the communist intellectual Frank Marshall Davis, said of Brown's remarks, "I think this shows Mr. Brown is a lot smarter than I realized and he's a lot more honest." Martin told me that he was planning to publish a defense of Brown on his Web site.