Apparently hoping to outdo Hillary Clinton's improbable attempt to reinvent herself as a duck hunter, John Kerry has tried to avoid alienating supporters of gun rights by depicting himself as a deer hunter. Mark Steyn will have none of it.

Steyn said yesterday (quoted in the London Telegraph):

"He was in Wisconsin the other day, pretending to be a regular guy, and was asked what kind of hunting he preferred. 'I'd have to say deer,' said the senator. 'I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach. ... That's hunting.'

"This caused huge hilarity among my New Hampshire neighbors. None of us has ever heard of anybody deer hunting by crawling around on his stomach, even in Massachusetts. The trick is to blend in with the woods and, given that John Kerry already looks like a forlorn tree in late fall, it's hard to see why he'd give up his natural advantage in order to hunt horizontally.

Oh, Pooh

"Possibly his weird Vietnam nostalgia is getting out of control. Still, if I come across a guy in the woods in deer season inching through the undergrowth with a mouthful of bear scat, at least I'll know who it is," Steyn noted.

Considering that these days Kerry looks more like a bunny wabbit than Elmer Fudd, perhaps he could use a refresher course from Gun Owners of America, which, by the way, he still hasn't met with, despite his phony claim that he'd meet with any critical group.

Update from a reader from Minnesota: "The fact that John Kerry claims he crawls around on the ground while deer hunting is less ridiculous than the fact that he claims to hunt deer with a double-barrel 12 gauge. Ask any hunter. You hunt deer with either a rifle or a shotgun that can shoot slugs (which you cannot do with a double-barrel shotgun). To a true deer hunter, Kerry's claim is even more ludicrious than Howard Dean stating that the book of Job is in the New Testament and then claiming he is a devout Christian. Kerry's statement clearly shows he has absolutely no clue about hunting."