We would not be writing this had we not, only scant weeks past, found it necessary to opine on California’s new law to end crimes against goosemanity (read "Let Them Eat Cardboard in California").

Urgently, however, it came to our attention that John Kerry went, gasp, goose hunting on a fine Ohio swing state morning, media in tow but kept at an appropriately safe shooting distance. That raises questions, some of serious import, some not.

First, how can this be? John Kerry must win California. Do the good goose-loving people of the Golden State know they will be voting for a confessed goose murderer (unless, realizing his dilemma, Kerry decides sometime tomorrow that he didn’t really shoot the goose he shot today)? Does John Kerry know that in an attempt to be photographed with yet another gun in his hands he is about to offend a large bloc of voters? Or are liberal gun grabbers just too cynical to care? Did Kerry know that on the scale of manly choices, goose hunting ranks only slightly above clay pigeons? It just ain’t bear or mountain lions at 20 feet. What is the moral difference between owning a handgun one would never use other than to defend oneself and a shotgun one does use to murder poor, innocent geese in a campaign stunt?

Now, this writer has been goose hunting. Been man hunting, too, when half a county was deputized to chase an escaped incestor through the piney woods of Georgia (it was a different time in America). We didn’t get him, but we might have if we had had John Kerry crawling around on his belly, tracking and decoying as he has previously allowed that he does when hunting.

The fact is that John Kerry is to hunting as Teresa Heinz Kerry is to someone who ever had a real job, just to keep this topical and in the family. John Kerry is to guns as kids are to toys. He wants his to himself, but he’ll take yours, too.

Perhaps shooting at fleeing geese is Mr. Kerry’s way of reminding us that he was bemedaled in Vietnam for shooting at fleeing villagers. That seems a bit bizarre, but who other than Charles Krauthammer, a trained psychiatrist, knows how such people think? Many sportsmen, of course, go hunting just for the camaraderie of being among men in fields.

John Kerry would, however, appear on no one’s list of hunter-gatherers, and bagging only one goose, which he said he was too lazy to carry, is unlikely to impress many women voters. We bet he didn’t clean his either, and besides, according to the Associated Press, no one actually saw him shoot the one kill he claimed, just as no one ever remembers him running in a marathon.

At least Bill Clinton was a real hypocrite. Goofy John Kerry is just a poor caricature.