The first rule of holes, when you're stuck in one, stop digging, went woefully unapplied recently in Montclair, California, just shy of where I used to live. From USAToday:
A homeowner digging for gold in his front yard said he got "carried away" and ended up with a 60-foot-deep hole, authorities said.
Henry Mora, 63, began digging 10 days ago after his gold detector reported a positive hit near his front patio. He told authorities he only intended to go down three or four feet. "I figured, well, maybe there's something down there — you would logically conclude, right? So I started digging," the semiretired musician said.
Fire officials called to the scene Tuesday found two men that Mora hired were inside the hole, using a bucket and rope to remove dirt.
If Mr. Mora is looking for gainful employment, he could do well to apply as an adviser to Senator and one time presidential hopeful John Kerry. That spry prospector is still sending up buckets of dirt in search of a winning position on Iraq. The most recent bucket spilled out a proposal for leaving Iraq within a year. Powerline reports the result:
By a decisive 86-13 vote, the U.S. Senate today rejected John Kerry's proposal for a complete withdrawal from Iraq by July 1 of next year--a completely arbitrary date that replaced the equally arbitrary date in Kerry's last proposal, December 31, 2006.
Just how deep a hole Kerry has dug himself into may be judged from this article by Kate Zernike, in the New York Times:
When Senator John Kerry was their presidential nominee in 2004, Democrats fervently wished he would express himself firmly about the Iraq war.
Mr. Kerry has found his resolve. But it has not made his fellow Democrats any happier. They fear the latest evolution of Mr. Kerry's views on Iraq may now complicate their hopes of taking back a majority in Congress in 2006. . . .
Mr. Kerry now describes the war in Iraq as a mistake, even though he once supported it. His critics say they believe the new stand reflects more politics than principle, and ignores other Democrats' concern that setting a fixed date will leave those in tough re-election fights open to Republican taunts that they are "cutting and running" in Iraq.
The Democrats' exasperation has increased in the last week, as they postponed a vote on Mr. Kerry's amendment to try to fashion a broader consensus among themselves. Democrats up for re-election asked him not to propose a fixed date. But Mr. Kerry, several Democrats said, was unwilling to budge from that idea, even though his co-sponsor, Senator Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, seemed willing to compromise for the sake of consensus. In the end, Mr. Kerry agreed only to extend his deadline, from Dec. 31 of this year to July 2007.
Mr. Kerry's insistence on pushing ahead with his own plan has left the Democrats divided, and open to renewed Republican accusations that they are indecisive and weak — the same ridicule that Republicans heaped on Mr. Kerry in 2004, when his "I was for it before I was against it" statement about a vote on money for the war became a punch line.
I say keep digging Senator. Thar's gold in them thar pits! But don't expect anyone from your own party to help you climb out.
What is most disturbing about Zernike's article is not that the Democrats are considering the policy implications of their positions. They're politicians, after all. It's that they are considering nothing else. Unless Zernike is missing something, no one in the Democratic party seems to be asking what the best interest of the U.S. is, or what will help global law and order, or the Iraqi people. They are solely concerned with finding a policy that will help them win in November.
Update: If Kerry can't win in Providence, he can't win anywhere. This by David Mitchell, Jr. in the Providence Journal:
For 35 years I have tried to resist the cynical view of Mr. Kerry. I have tended to believe it but have tried to resist it for two reasons. First, many who were young during the Vietnam era were radically inconsistent in their political beliefs. Whatever those beliefs were, I think that we owe each other a moment of forgiveness before death or senility makes it impossible!
Second, the cynical take on one whose public career spans 40 years -- beginning with statements made as a student at Yale -- could be wrong. Wouldn't a perfect consistency more truly impeach a man's character than his being guilty of being part of his times?
Such a benign view of John Kerry's careening flip-flops these 40 years was a lot easier to defend two months ago, before he put a coda on them. First, in April, he did a sort of anniversay lap commemorating his April 22, 1971, Senate testimony with op-ed pieces in The New York Times and The Boston Globe.
These writings ended Senator Kerry's "Reporting for duty" period, of the 2004 presidential campaign, and returned him to his anti-war "last man to die for a mistake" period, of 35 years earlier. Then, on June 13, with President Bush in Baghdad, he addressed a Democratic "TakeBack America" conference with a call to withdraw American forces from Iraq by the end of 2006 -- that would be a little more than 26 weeks from now.
Sen. Hillary Clinton was willing to hear some boos from this crowd by arguing that this would not be in America's best interest. Given that the president was in Iraq as Mr. Kerry spoke, that a democratic Iraqi cabinet had at long last just been formed, that the terrorist al-Zarqawi had finally just been killed, and that most Iraqis expressly believe that a premature departure of British and American forces would be catastrophic, it is impossible not to see this latest Kerry flip-flop as transparently self-serving.
Recent Comments