Sure, it’s useful to have a Republican rear end in “Ted Kennedy’s” Senate seat, and will be even more useful if it ends that Republicans have a one seat majority in the Senate following the next elections – a long-shot but not impossible outcome.

But at the end of the day, Scott Brown (R-MA) is still from Massachusetts and, despite the frenzied support of Tea Party activists, he’s a northeastern “moderate” Republican and a politician.

So, it’s not surprising to learn that Scott Brown is now going to support the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, being for it before he was against it before he was for it.

With Brown’s support and that of (worthless RINO) Susan Collins (R-ME), Harry Reid only needs to scrape one piece of GOP political sludge off the Senate floor to vote for a bill that will do damage to our economy by making credit more difficult and more expensive to get while doing nothing to stop the government-caused excesses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which were perhaps the single largest cause of the financial and real estate meltdowns.

Brown says the bill “is a better bill than it was when this whole process started."  What a pathetic standard that is for some of the most far-reaching economic and financial legislation we’ve seen in a generation.  I’m sure the second year of the Yugo was a better car than its first year, but that doesn’t mean anyone actually wants one.

Brown’s move is not just terrible for the economy, it’s bad politics.  Being the “party of no", or preferably the “party of hell, no!” is serving the GOP well during these times of a renewed skepticism of and dislike for an over-reaching overly expensive government.

I’ve written many times before that bipartisanship is not a valuable goal in its own right and should never be pursued for its own sake. Bipartisanship almost always means what we’re seeing now: Republicans moving to damaging Democrat positions. The opposite almost never happens.  Democrats are like water running over boulders in a river.  The boulders may think they’re pretty solid but the water knows that in the long run, it wins.  The persistent and patient liberals are slowly but surely eroding everything that has made America great.  The least that Republicans can do, even if just-barely Republicans like Scott Brown, is stand as strong as possible against the Democrats’ largest, most aggressive, most expensive, most anti-freedom power grabs.

Behavior like Scott Brown’s, even allowing for the fact that he’s a Republican from Massachusetts, represents exactly the sort of behavior that so dismayed Republicans and conservatives in the 2006 and 2008 elections.  While “FinReg” might pass because of Brown’s poor judgment, at least it seems that many other Republicans have learned that political lesson.

Our best hope for Scott Brown is that his vote becomes much less critical in 2011.  In the meantime, the man who campaigned as the 41st vote against ObamaCare is now the 59th vote for an utterly irresponsible regulatory bill which refuses to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Shortly after Brown’s announcement, Maine’s other worthless Senator, Olympia Snowe, also agreed to sign on to FinReg.  Just so you understand, if at least one Democrat doesn’t break ranks with Harry Reid, FinReg will pass on the backs of “Republican” Senators from Maine and Massachusetts.

It’s a really tough call whether it’s worth having those people in the GOP.  Do they help the head count or destroy the brand?  They do both.  Which one is more important seems to depend on the year.  In the long run, however, the brand is more important than the head count.  And to that extent, liberty-loving residents of those states, if there are any – and there should be in a place with a revolutionary history like Massachusetts – should toss them out if they can be replaced by more consistent champions of America and American values.