RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro is, like the London square drawn on its cover, tumultuous, dark and teeming with life. In the cover art, unruly crowds throng the streets, prodded and chased by authorities struggling to maintain order. In the foreground, a horse drags a traitor bound to a wicker sled toward the focus of the public’s attention: a gallows, where a man is being hung. Nearby, another man is being quartered; an executioner throws his leg, severed at the thigh, into a fire pit for cremation.

I dwell on the book’s cover art for two reasons. First, because The Year of Lear is unusually well-illustrated from start to finish, from the jacket—with gold foil details and ye olde printing press lettering—to the glossy insert with portraits of the book’s major players. (It is one of those rare books that is worth the surcharge to buy in hardcover.) Second, I mention the cover art because it distills the book down to one poignant, violent image.

This is no mean feat. The Year of Lear, for its seemingly limited scope, is an epic. Shapiro, a Columbia professor and governor at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has written a book brimming with detail about 17th century England, if not necessarily about Shakespeare.

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.

Deal or no deal?

As Fox News Channel business commentator John Layfield recently suggested, I googled a November 19 State Department letter to U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kans.). And then, as happens too often these days, my jaw dropped.

Referring to Obama’s vaunted Iran-nuke deal, Julia Frifield, assistant secretary for legislative affairs, wrote: “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

So atop its multifarious pitfalls and Trojan horses, the Iran nuke deal is not even signed.

No American adult would buy a used Chevy without securing a signed contract from the car salesman. And yet Obama — the all-wise alumnus of Columbia University and Harvard Law School — rests the future of Iran’s atomic-bomb program on a sheet of paper that is not even signed?

Iran did not fail to sign the ObamaNuke deal because someone forgot to hand some mullah a pen. This was a deliberate act of omission.

“If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said last August, as NRO’s Joel Gehrke recently noted. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?”

No problem, Assistant Secretary Frifield insists: “The JCPOA reflects political commitments between Iran, P5+1 (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China) and the European Union.”

The tragic 1969 car accident that left a young woman dead at the hands of late Sen. Ted Kennedy will make it to the big screen for a film that the project’s producer says will show audiences what Kennedy “had to go through.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, 50 Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson has signed on to direct Chappaquiddick, which was recently named to the 2015 Blacklist.

Project producer Mark Ciardi told THR Monday, “I’ve done a lot of true life stories, many sports stories, but this one had a deep impact on this country. Everyone has an idea of what happened on Chappaquiddick and this strings together the events in a compelling and emotional way.

Ciardi adds: “You’ll see what he had to go through.”

Finally- the words “jihad” and “Islam (Radical natch)” have made their way into the foreign policy and terrorism debate.

One winner was Wolf Blitzer who moderated fairly and efficiently. One loser was Hugh Hewitt who got appropriately booed by asking a dumb question of Dr. Ben Carson.A few days will tell will be the declared winners and losers by the poll weevils.

As for the candidates? I have only one real litmus test now. Who can beat Hillary?

My bet is on Marco Rubio….so far.

And speaking of Rubio,he will leave the Senate and an open seat in Florida.

Ron de Santis a great Congressman who currently represents District 6 has already announced a run. During his active duty Navy service, he served as a military prosecutor, supported operations at the terrorist detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and deployed to Iraq during the 2007 troop surge as an advisor to a U.S. Navy SEAL commander in support of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. He has also performed duties as a federal prosecutor, taught courses on military law, and written on constitutional issues.

He has introduced the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Prevention Act in order to strengthen national security and ensure that terrorists cannot exploit the United States’ refugee resettlement program.

Stay tuned!!

As Christmas approaches, many Americans are making their holiday reading lists—and their plans to cozy up over a long vacation with the year’s hot books or their piles of unopened magazines. But it’s important, too, to think about the value of rereading favorite works: Robert Frost’s poems, perhaps, or George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.”

We do a lot of rereading at my college. Students are instructed to reread assignments once or twice before going to class, and professors in faculty study groups must reread books from the college’s core list.

Yet some regard rereading as a guilty pleasure. After all, new books come out all the time. “With the shelves thus groaning,” Hephzibah Anderson wrote last year for the BBC, “pulling down a well-thumbed favourite feels like an unconscionable indulgence.”

Surely we shouldn’t give in to this feeling. There may have been a time when so few books had been published that one could read everything. But that was several centuries ago. It doesn’t make much sense to feel guilty for failing to attain an impossible goal.

As the only person to have won the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of sheer hope rather than actual achievement, Barack Hussein Obama could be expected to do everything within his power to vindicate this unprecedented show of trust. Instead he has presided over a clueless foreign policy that has not only exacerbated ongoing regional conflicts but made the world a far more dangerous place. Nowhere has this phenomenon been more starkly demonstrated than in the Middle East where the Nobel laureate has abetted Tehran’s drive for regional hegemony and brought the regime within a stone’s throw of nuclear weapons; driven Iraq and Libya to the verge of disintegration; expedited the surge of Islamist terrorism; exacerbated the Syrian civil war and its attendant refugee problem; made the intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict almost irresolvable; and plunged Washington’s regional influence and prestige to unprecedented depths,[1] paving the road in grand style to Russia’s resurgence.
Duped by the Mullahs

Consider Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons, perhaps the foremost threat to Middle Eastern stability, if not to world peace, in the foreseeable future. In a sharp break from the Bush administration’s attempts to coerce the mullahs to desist from this relentless drive, which culminated in five U.N. Security Council resolutions imposing a string of escalating economic sanctions,[2] Obama opted for the road of “engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect”[3] with the presumptuous aim of mending the 30-year-long U.S.-Iranian breach and reintegrating the Islamist regime in Tehran into the international system.