Barf Alert - Peter Schrag: A 'vast carelessness' -- the president's and ours

Sacramento Bee ^ | December 27, 2006 | Peter Schrag

[pf flyers]

The year-end debate about the Iraq Study Group's unequivocal diagnosis of failure and its grim list of uncertain remedies is the real measure of the hopelessness of the mess America made. The ISG's 79 recommendations -- some wise, some impolitic, some impossible -- is itself a confession that all the choices are bad.

That's not the commission's fault: No one else has a persuasive idea either, least of all the president -- the self-proclaimed decider -- who started and ran this misbegotten war.

As Nick Carraway says about the privileged and insouciant Tom and Daisy at the end of "The Great Gatsby" (1925): "They were careless people ... they smashed up things and creatures and then they retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made ... ."

[pf flyers]

Schrag is my favorite Sacramento Bee 5th columnist. His viewpoint is always predictable and his stuttering prose is hilarious. He even quotes from "The Great Gatsby" on this one! (Wow, he's read a book maybe, albeit one that was assigned in high school.)

[gcruse]

" they smashed up things and creatures and then they retreated back "

It isn't the smashers advocating retreat...