As the song almost says, what a difference a year makes: 2017 is not over yet, but it’s been a lousy one so far. Losing two very close friends was a real bummer, for starters. Then the Brexit negotiations and the Trump presidency revealed that I had declared victory too soon. This time last year I was singing about what a great year it had been, what a great mood I was in, and so on. The British people had decided that they no longer wished to be led by and take orders from a peanut vendor from Luxembourg called Jean-Claude Asshole. Yippee!
One year on, the asshole, in cahoots with British left-wing rabble, seems to have confused the issue enough that the hapless Theresa is upping the ante for Britain to become independent again. Not so yippee! The Donald isn’t making my life any easier either. Not on account of his tweets — the jihadis do it non-stop, so why shouldn’t he? The reason I’m starting to doubt his sanity is that he’s climbed in bed with the Saudis, which is like investing all one’s moolah with Madoff on 9 December 2008. No one benefits from a deal with the Saudis. They even cheat the hookers who work hard for a living. I have great respect for John Bradley and our sainted editor who wrote about that sandy hellhole four weeks ago. The only trouble is that they are giving the benefit of the doubt to this mini-Napoleon Mohammed bin Salman. My experience with the Saudis is that they never pay their debts, cheat on contracts and agreements, and tell lies that make Baron Munchausen sound like Enoch Powell.
The mini-Napoleon had a fool like Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times in for a chat, fed him some lamb, and Friedman began gushing like a Texas oil well. What they didn’t talk about were those thousands of Yemeni children with swollen bellies who are being starved to death by the Saudi blockade, and the fact that the heroic Saudi pilots, led by American navigators and forward air controllers, have managed to bomb hospitals and schools, and even marriages and funerals. Famous victories that are all, according to the Saudis, on a par with the Battle of Britain.
When the mini-Napoleon arrested Al-Waleed bin Talal, a man reputed to have 20 or so billion smackers, he asked him where the loot came from. The same place the $500 million dollars that you overpaid the Russian oligarch for his boat last summer came from, should have been the answer. Mind you, between you, me and the camels, all the greedy ones from the west, people who used to hang out in Tripoli trying to do business with Gaddafi, are now hanging out in Riyadh. I know I sound jaded, but what is going on as far as I’m concerned is a shakedown by gangsters of other gangsters who got there first.
The Saudi Caesar was assured by the Donald that if the Saudis played nice with the Israelis, the latter would do to the mullahs in Iran what they more often than not do to the Palestinians every week or so. The Israelis, however, have been accused of many things, many of them true. But stupidity is not one of them. And Iran is no push-over. Israel’s nukes will never be used except in dire circumstances when the nation is about to go under. And Israel is not about to get into a war in the deserts of Arabia so the camel-drivers can visit London and enrich the few hookers who demand payment before rather than after.
But enough of camels; let’s have some real news for a change. Last week Jay-Z, a billionaire rapper, music entrepreneur and ex-crack cocaine dealer, finally admitted cheating on his wife Beyoncé, a singer. (So that would explain why, three years ago, her sister kicked him in the shins, rather hard. Michael Mailer and I had been in the elevator where it happened a few moments before history was made. Had Mikey and I taken that lift up to the Boom Boom Room ten minutes later, we could have seen history in the making. A billionaire ex-crack cocaine dealer ferociously attacked by a vengeful sister-in-law.)
How did I get this world exclusive? Easy. The editor-in-chief of the NY Times, Dean Baquet, got an exclusive interview with Jay-Z, published it, and I bought the paper and read it. That’s how great scoops are achieved. The top banana of the Times waits patiently to interview one of our greatest men ever, and then the poor little Greek boy reads it while riding on the subway. (And if you believe the last item, you believe that Jean-Claude Asshole is a great man.)
So, 2017 is drawing to a close and I am very busy organising my ‘goodbye to New York’ Christmas party, an annual event I host with Michael Mailer. One of last year’s guests, Harvey Weinstein, will not be attending, and in a way I feel cowardly for not inviting him. But then we have about 40 young women coming and if he were to show up we’d end up being 40 men and no women, so there you have it. Hello, girls; goodbye, Harvey. Yippee!
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