The Founding Shopper

...Washington seemed to express no doubt: God had been on our side, and we should work to keep it that way...

...Unfortunately, they know nothing else...

...Animal Farm, after all, was more than a barnyard fable...

...It was "largely written by Thomas Jefferson," Weintraub reports...

...and into which none but the All-powerful guide, and great disposer of human Events could have prevented his falling...

...A bitter irony of the Clinton years is that for all of the accomplishments his supporters laud and all the scandals his opponents bemoan, it is for what he did not do that he is most likely to be remembered...

...Try to imagine any of the current candidates, or even a future nominee, as a secular saint...

...Yet Congress's Christmas wish for Washington was not a republic of this earth, but a place in the Kingdom of Heaven...

...All the evidence is against it...

...I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my Official life," he said, "by commending the interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have superintendence of them, to his holy keeping...

...He shared their anti-imperialist views, but their herd instinct repelled him...

...Bowker, in Inside George Orwell, says it is "not just a work of shining integrity, but the clearest version of Orwell's own version of socialism, one inspired more by Christianity than Marx...

...In Annapolis, Congress had seen the text of Washington's speech and had prepared a response...

...But when he was stationed in Burma, the pundits who annoyed him most were the leftist ones who spoke so knowingly about the place but had never spent any time there...

...The Founding Shopper General Washington's Christmas Fareure& A Mount Vernon Hornecornimg, 1783 By Stanley Weintraub (Free Press, 224 pages, $25) Reviewed by Terence P Jeffrey ONG BEFORE LT...

...It is there, in the realm of public policy, not of personal misconduct, that Lowry makes his most provocative arguments about the failures of the Clinton administration...

...72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004...

...Nonetheless you can make the case that Orwell represented what was best in the Christian-Judeo tradition without vandalizing his coffin...

...Weintraub's book is a quick and pleasant read—a worthy literary travelogue that tells readers where Washington really did sleep and where he was feted in the final weeks of 1783 as he made his way home for Terence P Jeffrey is editor of Human Events and a nationally syndicated columnist...

...Thus Spain, where Orwell fought with a Marxist militia, endured the horrors of trench life, and saw the Communists betray a revolution, was a defining experience in his life...

...His final words were as much a consecration as a farewell...

...This is Nineteen Eighty-four's "doublethink," the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in mind—war is peace, defeat is victory—and it is a form of "newthink," and it leads to "duckspeak...

...A diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our Cause, the support of the Supreme Power of the Union, and the patronage of Heaven...

...It crystallized his political thinking, and influenced much of what he would write later...

...WILLIAM G. BOYKIN became the object of an inquisition for having sketched ut—in a church of all places—what he under stood to be the rough theological outlines of the war against terrorism, American war leaders had no qualms declaring that God was on our side...

...Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be," he said, "while holding untenable opinions...

...But Homage to Catalonia came first, of course, and while it sold only 800 copies when it was first published, in 1938, it is recognized now as a classic...

...He documents the smears, blackmail, and coercion that went on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, dwarfing by comparison the dirtiest deeds of J. Edgar Hoover even in his heyday...

...No one really...

...In foreign affairs and national security, Lowry lays out a damning case of presidential neglect, shortsightedness, and half-measures...

...And James Madison, future author of the First Amendment, was persuaded that this closing paragraph was written by the very man now reputed to be the architect of a wall of separation between church and state: We join with you in commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God, beseeching Him to dispose the hearts and minds of its citizens to improve the opportunity afforded them of becoming a happy and respectable nation...

...I resign with satisfaction" he said, "the Appointment I accepted with diffidence...

...A really accomplished duckspeaker could make you believe that a tragedy was somehow a triumph...

...When Evelyn Waugh visited Orwell in the hospital a few months before he died, he is supposed to have said afterwards that his old friend was "very near to God...

...Its mindlessness would appall him, and so would the leftist intellectuals...

...Orwell, I am certain, would deplore the antiAmericanism that is now so fashionable on the left, especially as it is expressed by European intellectuals...

...When Orwell heard about that he was amused...

...In his own way, Rich Lowry makes the same comment on President Clinton when he asks how a "hyperintelligent, empathetic" person with "an amazing capacity for endurance, lasting through political setbacks and personal humiliations" could so manifestly have failed in so many important parts of his job...

...His treatment of the Lewinsky affair, impeachment, and the other narrow scrapes is enlivened by an appropriate discussion of the Nixonlike cover-ups of evidence and Gestapo-like intimidation of witnesses which underscored the administration's damage control mode...

...You can't...

...It can help us frame our own views...

...Many respectable thinkers have already done so...

...It would be presumptuous and dishonest, no matter how comforting it might be to some, to claim now that Orwell reallybelieved in God, and that his atheism was a sham...

...The idea that there was a life after death was unsustainable, but the moral baggage that accompanied that belief was indispensable...

...Later, safely home, Washington would write to his former lieutenant, Henry Knox, likening himself to a traveler who "from his House top is looking back, and tracing with a grateful eye the Meanders by which he escaped the quicksands and Mires which lay in his way...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW part and the knowledge on which that history rests...

...They substituted ide ology and sloganeering for independent thinking...

...Orwell was one of a kind, and there is no pretending otherwise...

...But ideological shell game or not, speculating on what Orwell's views would be if he were here today is worthwhile...

...no one can...

...No doubt the book went a long way toward confirming the view of both Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender, of Orwell 'the secular saint.— SO WHO SHOULD INHERIT ORWELL'S MANTLE...

...One Eye in the Mirror Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years by Rich Lowry (Regnery, 256 pages, $27.95) Reviewed by Dick Morris ARSHAL PETAIN, in his World War I heroic mold, may have pronounced the best judg ment on Bill Clinton when he commented on the graduates of St...

...Assessing the Clinton years without focusing on their culmination on September 11 would be like discussing Harding and Coolidge without mentioning the stock market crash that took place, Dick Morris, a former consultant to President Clinton, is the author of Off With Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks, and Obstructionists in American Politics, Media, and Business...

...Evidence for this emerges from the pages of Stanley Weintraub's new book, General Washington's Christmas Farewell...

...It seems unlikely that Orwell would find a home today on either side...

...On the other hand, Orwell never had much use for media pundits, whether they were on the left or the right...

...Once a whore, always a whore," he said when he dismissed them in the past, and I think he would say that again...

...They know everything," the redoubtable general said...

...After eight long years of war, America was finally a free and independent state...

...Cry, the French military academy...

...But Lowry's most interesting discussion centers on Clinton's record between the foul lines, on the playing field of American politics...

...Again I can only imagine what he might say about so many pundits today, but the herd instinct runs deeply now on both the left and the right, and unanimity is expected on all issues...

...He also says it is possible to see Homage to Catalonia "as the quintessential expression of Christian Socialism (and the highest virtues of Judaism and Islam...

...And for You, we address to Him our warmest prayers, that a life so beloved, may be fostered with all His care—that your days may be happy as they have been illus trious, and that He will finally give you that reward which this world cannot give...

...But I can only imagine what he might say whenev er the Administration claims, as it often does now, that suicide bombings in Baghdad prove that the enemy is becoming "desperate" because conditions there are returning to "normal...

...70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 BOOKS IN REVI Washington told Congress, it increased his "gratitude for the interposition of Providence...

...It was about the betrayal of a revolution...

...The mission of Lowry's book is to deal with the Clinton legacy in total, not just the obvious scandals that plagued his tenure...