Gomez hammers ‘Dirty Ed Markey’ in new ad

{mosads}”Negative ads from ‘Dirty Ed Markey,’ smearing Gabriel Gomez, comparing him to bin Laden. Now, Markey actually blames Gomez for the Newtown shooting. Disgusting,” a narrator says.

Another narrator goes on to suggest voters should “try something new” in Gomez. The ad ends with the tagline “Gomez: The future starts today.”

Markey’s campaign ran a web video that brought criticism for flashing Gomez’s face next to a shot of Osama bin Laden for a brief portion of the video, and in his last ad, charged that Gomez opposed a ban on high-capacity magazines, “like the ones used in the Newtown school shooting.”

Gomez said in a statement accompanying his new ad that Markey’s ads were an attempt to distract from his record.

“Congressman Ed Markey plays dirty politics,” he said. “He resorts to dirty politics so he doesn’t have to talk about his ineffective record.”

Markey’s campaign spokesman Andrew Zucker pushed back against the ad, noting that it exaggerated the extent to which Markey tied Gomez to the Newtown shootings and calling it a “desperate attack.”

“Gabriel Gomez calls himself ‘a new kind of Republican,’ but his latest desperate attack rips pages from the same old failed Republican playbook, and will do nothing to distract from the fact that a vote for Gabriel Gomez is just one more Republican vote against commonsense gun laws, Social Security and a woman’s right to choose,” he said.

The ad comes as Gomez shifts into a new offensive leg of his campaign, after facing multiple weeks during which he faced criticism from Democrats for a controversial tax deduction he took on his house in 2005.

Gomez has spent this week hammering Markey on his national security record.

The ad will run statewide starting Wednesday.

Watch it here:

–This post was updated at 9:53 p.m.