Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's campaign for the U.S. Senate is hoping to contain the damage from last week's flap over his misstatement of his Vietnam-era service record.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is determined not to let it go quietly, and is up with a new web-based attack ad that ties Blumenthal to a long list of Democratic politicians who've done wrong. (Can't believe they left Clinton out of this hall of shame.)

And there's got to be an extra level of annoyance for Blumenthal at the voice we hear at the outset: that's Eliot Spitzer, the crusading attorney general turned governor of New York who Blumenthal will gladly remind you got into the white-hat activist-A.G. game only after Blumenthal himself did. Blumenthal has never seemed particularly like the Spitzer comparison, for the reason that he has been doing the job longer than Spitzer did it, though Spitzer tended to get all the national credit. For obvious reasons, he certainly must not like the comparison now.

The ad is here. Expect Linda McMahon to follow a similar script as the campaign between her and Blumenthal begins in earnest.

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Of course, the Blumenthal campaign will have its own web-based mud to sling. They could start by asking if this sort of gesture, fictional or not, is the sort of self-presentation worthy of a U.S. Senator.

There are only five photos on that site of McMahon slapping (pretending to slap?) her daughter Stephanie in a WWE skit. You better believe Democratic operatives are scouring the Web for more material like it.

Anything to do what the NRSC is trying to do to Blumenthal: Change your mind about the character of the other guy.