"Annie Oakley" Clinton bungles her gun ad

From Ben Smith at Politico:

Senator Hillary Clinton's mailing attacking Senator 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 non-existent 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, the president of Navy Arms in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Forgett's company was Mauser's agent in the United States when the gun was released, and who 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."

The gun's image in Clinton's mailing is below; a correct image of the gun is below.

Other rifle enthusiasts emailed Politico after an image of Clinton's mailing was posted to [Politico].

"I bet the Clinton folks did a mirror flip on the stock image to make it look more 'aesthetic,'" wrote one, David Phillips. "What a latte-sipping, Gucci-wearing thing to do."

The Mauser 66, released in 1966 and no longer manufactured, is a high-end hunting rifle that found military use as a sniper rifle. In Clinton’s mailing, it’s pictured with a double-set trigger, a customization that’s popular in Europe, but "almost unheard of in the United States," Forgett said.

"It's a $2,200 German import – it's hardly typical of what the average workingman in Indiana uses," he said.

Ouch. So she botched the presentation of this weapon in her mailer, to me that's not even remotely the worst of it. What is the worst of it?

Hillary Clinton is sending out mailers showing a sniper rifle pointed at the head of Barack Obama, the likely next President of the United States. This mailer is many things: misleading, ill-considered, and poorly executed, but one thing it isn't is Democratic. Hillary Clinton is showing more and more that she is outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party and should not be our nominee for the presidency.