RUTHFULLY YOURS

David Evanier’s Woody: The Biography is an engaging account of Woody Allen’s life and works. It’s not a biography in a traditional sense, like Marion Meade’s 2000 The Unruly Life of Woody Allen or Eric Lax’s 1991 Woody Allen, the only biography for which Allen fully cooperated. Nor is it like the many books, most recently Richard Schickel’s 2003 Woody Allen: A Life in Film, which focus on Allen’s movies. What Evanier has done is marry the two approaches, weaving between Allen’s life and his creative output, which makes sense given that Allen is so enmeshed in his films. Evanier notes that Allen is “the only comedian in Hollywood history to insert the same unchanging comic persona into every genre of his filmmaking: comedy, satire, melodrama—and yet work himself effectively into the plot.”

Of Allen’s early life we learn he was a peculiar, if talented child. Peculiar, for instance, in his reaction to learning about death when he was five. He apparently never recovered from the shock. Evanier notes the scene in Annie Hall where the mother takes her son (obviously meant to be a young Allen) to the doctor because he has become depressed. The reason—he has learned that the universe is expanding. “Someday it will break apart,” the boy says, “and that will be the end of everything.”

Only some aspects of Woody’s on-screen persona are true of the real-life Allen. Yes, he was funny, hypochondrial, introverted, shy with girls—“a nerdy type of person,” a childhood friend says. But, like Allen’s other biographers, Evanier emphasizes that in crucial respects Woody is unlike the character he plays. Lax calls him “a business tycoon.” Evanier says: “Allen is not a schlemiel, a nebbish, a sad sack, or a Kafkaesque character.” Unheard of in Hollywood, he has total artistic control of his films. Even his appearance belies the movie image. Evanier quotes Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, who saw Allen on the street: “I was struck by how utterly different his posture was from his image: strong, stiff, upright.”

Precious were the recriminations after the first Democratic presidential debate. Putative nominee Hillary Clinton, amid what is more a coronation than a contest, had proudly boasted of making the Republicans her “enemy.”

“How despicable,” GOP graybeards gasped. After all, this is just politics, not war. At the end of the day, we’re all fellow patriots, all in this together: not “red states and blue states,” as that notorious bipartisan, Barack Obama, framed it in the 2004 convention speech that put him on the map, but “one people . . . all of us defending the United States of America.”

Dinesh D’Souza begs to differ. He would tell you that Hillary hit the nail on the head, and that we’d better get a grip on that or we will lose the country that we love.

D’Souza has come about this realization the hard way, as he explains in his remarkable new book, Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party. For his “experience with criminal gangs,” to which he alludes in the book’s subtitle, the prolific conservative author and filmmaker has the president to thank. The book, part memoir, part polemic, part prescription, and part Kafka, opens with an account — frightening because it is so verifiably true — of one of the grossest abuses of power by this lawless administration: the prosecution of D’Souza for a campaign-finance offense.

It’s official: on October 10, Iran tested an Emad ballistic missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. A panel of experts commissioned by the UN Security Council reported that the launch violated Security Council Resolution 1929, which says “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons…”

Iran is also known to have tested yet another nuclear-capable missile on November 21.

That’s one development on the Iran front — continuing to develop potential nuke-carrying missiles in blatant breach of U.N. resolutions.

And the other development is that the board of directors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has voted to close the books on ten years of Iran’s illegal nuclear-weapons work, thereby helping open the path — as the Obama administration and its allies devoutly hope — to the lifting of sanctions on Iran in January.

The IAEA’s board of directors gave Iran a clean bill of health even though, earlier this month, the agency’s own investigators released a report that in no way confirmed that Iran hadn’t already been working on nuclear weapons or had stopped working on them. As the Chicago Tribune noted in an editorial, the report — based on the meager information Iran did provide — established that Iran had “secretly worked on weapons design, testing and components needed for a bomb until 2009.” Iran was otherwise brazenly evasive, simply not answering 3 of the 12 questions that the investigators asked, and giving only partial answers to some of the others.

Not content with creating havoc in the U.S. economy, setting Americans against each other, and forcing through a health reform act which has nothing to do with health but everything to do with the redistribution of wealth and an immense increase in governmental interference, President Obama opened a Pandora’s Box in the Middle East. He ushered in a catastrophe not seen since World War 2.

From his notorious Cairo speech to the present time, President Obama speaks and disaster follows. Some commentators still believe that Obama is utterly naïve, which was why he could not understand what would happen in Egypt as a result of his undermining the Mubarak regime. But it is increasingly apparent, even to the most diehard Obama supporter, that there is something truly troubling about President Obama’s mindset.

Obama is not naïve at all. He is an ideologue and knows only too well what he is doing, for he is eagerly promoting Islamic power in the world while diminishing the West and Israel, irrespective of how much innocent blood flows as a result.