Channeling Wellstone

If the Democrats have learned anything in the last ten years, it's that gun-control is a completele non-starter.

John Kerry is trying to channel Paul Wellstone, relentlessly repating strawmen to draw attention away from his cynicism on the issue.

He makes a big show of his "love of hunting":

Democrats in West Virginia know that many of their state's voters guard their gun rights jealously, and that their fear in 2000 that Al Gore was out to take their weapons -- stoked by Republicans and the National Rifle Association -- helped seal the former vice president's defeat.

That's why Kerry stood on a stage here last week, proudly hoisting a shotgun and telling a throng of mine workers that he would like to go "gobble huntin' " with them as soon as possible.

This brings out a couple of issues - one of them being that many hunters are not that bright:

The scene boosted Kerry's image with at least one voter attending Kerry's Labor Day rally. "It cleared one problem up for me, with the guns," said Paul Cooper, 62, of Madison, who wore his Navy garrison cap under the hot sun. "He can't be against our guns, or want to take mine, if he's got one of his own."

Which is, of course, twaddle; Dianne Feinstein, Bill Cosby, Punch Sulzberger, William F. Buckley, Laurence Rockefeller, the bodyguards for anti-gun nag Rosie O'Donnell, and many more lefty celebs and pols have guns, but don't trust you to own them.

And John Kerry is one of them:

Kerry is the poster boy for a secret scheme hatched by billionaire Andrew McKelvey`s Americans for Gun Safety, (AGS) whereby anti-gun rights Democratic candidates cloak themselves in rhetorical camouflage, falsely claiming to embrace the Second Amendment and trying to con hunters into believing that their rights are somehow separate from those of other American gun owners.

Don`t take my word for it. Here`s what AGS wrote in its blueprint for "Taking Back the Second Amendment," prepared last year for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Kerry is following all the dots.

It is a battle plan for deceit that counsels anti-gun rights candidates: "The problem that Democrats have on the gun issue has far less to do with the typical policies they espouse than the rhetoric they employ." (Emphasis added.) In other words, it`s not how you vote, but what you say.

So, now confiscatory firearms prohibition is called "sensible gun safety," although the abhorrent concept of the knock-in-the-middle-of-the night is just the same as it always has been.

This is nothing new; Paul Wellstone, who earned his NRA "F" many times over, portrayed himself as a friend of the hunter; Kerry's parroting the same line today.

Most gun owners aren't stupid enough to buy this, of course; the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, and most of us know it.

But if you know a hunter who shows signs of buying Kerry's line, please, please smack them for me.

Posted by Mitch at September 21, 2004 05:18 AM | TrackBack