Continuing to parrot every potential Republican sound bite they can think of, Hillary Clinton's PR people have just sent out a mailer accusing Barack Obama of being insufficiently supportive of gun rights
But as Ben Smith describes in Politico, when Clinton's PR people created the display, they used a $2200 German rifle, "The Mauser 66, released in 1966 and no longer manufactured...a high-end hunting rifle that found military use as a sniper rifle." And then they flipped and Photoshopped it to create an image that would never exist in reality.
We've just finished seven years of a President who won on the politics of distortion--character attacks, manufactured wedge issues, and divisive ies,. Clinton seems Hell-bent on following this path, from "NAFTAGATE" to condemning the closing of a Valpraiso Indiana defense contractor that her husband in fact had helped sell to China. This is just one more example, but in this case executed so over-slickly that it may end up backfiring.
".....Sen. Hillary Clinton's mailing attacking Sen. Barack Obama's record on guns appears to include a striking visual gaffe: The image of the gun pictured on the face of the mailing is reversed, making it a nonexistent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle.
To make matters worse, a prominent gun dealer said, it's an expensive German gun with customized features that make it clearly European.
"The gun in the photo does not exist," said Val Forgett III, resident of Navy Arms in Martinsburg, W.Va. Forgett's company was Mauser's agent in the United States when the gun was released, and it sold Mauser guns here again in the 1990s. "The bolt is facing to the left side of the receiver, making it a left-handed bolt action rifle, indicating whoever constructed and approved the mailer did not recognize the image has been reversed."
Forgett said the error would be obvious to sportsmen.
'I find it laughable on its face,' he said. "It's like a picture of Babe Ruth hitting right-handed.'"