MARK SMITH MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

Whatever Bob Beckett, our county D.A., is thinking, we hope the voters will think equally profoundly on his words in the wake of not one but two highway accidents within the space of 24 hours.

In the first, he put a county-owned vehicle across a couple of lanes of traffic and rolled it.

That was just south of Shoshone, Calif. What he was doing in a vehicle owned by Nye County in Inyo County, he has not explained.

Bob did explain that he was "fidgeting with the radio" and lost control of the vehicle. Perhaps he was rewiring the internal controls. I know I fidget with my radio now and then, but I don't tear off across a couple of lanes of traffic and put my car onto its roof when I do.

Later, after the second accident, he reportedly told a California Highway Patrol trooper that he had ingested a Bud Light beforehand.

That must have been some Bud Light.

In that accident, he banged up and rolled over his personal van and blew a 0.1 percent on the breathalyzer. (I believe in most states the legal limit has been set at 0.08 percent.)

Whether Bob was lit is open to question and may also be immaterial.

What isn't is the fact that he managed to get into two wrecks and be cited for driving under the influence inside a 24-hour period.

What Bob hasn't said is that he is resigning from his position as the elected top law enforcement officer of Nye County.

Nor has he announced his decision to pull out of the election for a judgeship, think long and hard on his situation and then decide how best to continue his career as an attorney.

I couldn't help but notice what happened in France this past week.

A unit of the French army was putting on a firing demonstration for some civilians, and like a scene out of a black comedy the troops were loaded up not with blanks but with live ammo. Bullets, folks. Real ones.

At least one individual was killed outright and something like a dozen were wounded.

Within a day or two, the top general in the French army resigned, saying he was duty bound to take full responsibility for the horrible accident.

Here in Nye County, Bob Beckett also claimed to take "full responsibility."

He offered his sincere apology and said he hopes voters can forgive him for what he called "this singular lapse of judgment."

One wonders what he would have done had another individual died as a result of his "lapse of judgment."

Send flowers?

Well, even President Bush can slide out from under things by accepting "full responsibility," a phrase which has been eviscerated of all meaning.

It's come to mean nothing. Saying so is just mouthing so many words these days. You don't have to do a thing, or even mean anything, you just have to toss out some sad sounding phrases and all will be well.

In other words, you don't have to take responsibility at all, you just have to pretend you've done so.

No, I'm not calling for Bob to resign or pull out of the election.

I do hope, however, that the voters who count will do something other than pass it off as just another Pahrump moment of the sort we all cherish and love, and that we consider whether, at least this once, an elected official needs to be held to strict account.

That is, after all, what we expect our prosecuting attorneys to demand from defendants who appear before them.

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Just another advisory to letter-writers:

Yes, some of you have doubtless noticed your letters never got published.

They aren't going to be published, either, unless they follow the rules.

They have to be no more than 700 words in length, they have to include a daytime phone number, and they have to be signed with a real name that we will use in the paper.

We will not withhold names, period.

If you're concerned about, say, Tony DeMeo or Butch Borasky or Laurayne Murray, you have every responsibility to put your name down too.

We're not going to publish your phone number or your address. If you are from outside of Pahrump, we want to know from where you are writing.