Beyoncé

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Like the song almost says, what a difference a year makes: 2017 is not over yet, but it’s been a lousy one so far. For starters, losing two very close friends was a real bummer, then the Brexit negotiations and the Trump presidency revealed that I declared victory too soon. Last year at this time I was singing about what a great year it’s been, what a great mood I’m in, and so on. The British people had decided they no longer wished to be led by and take orders from a peanut vendor from Luxembourg called Jean-Claude Asshole. Yippee! One year later the asshole, in cahoots with left-wing Brit rabble, seems to have confused the issue enough that the hapless Teresa is upping the ante for Britain to become independent again. Not so yippee! The Donald isn’t making my life any easier either. No, not because he tweets anti-Muslim stuff—they do it nonstop, so why shouldn’t we? The reason I’m starting to doubt his sanity is that he’s gotten in bed with the Saudis, which is like investing all one’s moola with Madoff on Dec. 9, 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 the sainted editor of The Spectator, who wrote about that sandy hellhole three weeks ago. The only trouble is they are giving the benefit of the doubt to this mini Napoleon, Mohammad bin Salman. My experience with Saudis is they never pay their debts, they cheat on contracts and agreements, and they tell lies that make Baron Munchausen sound like Enoch Powell.

The mini Napoleon had a fool like Thomas 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 was 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 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 40-or-so billion smackers, he asked him where the loot came from. The same place your $550 million 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, like Steve Schwarzman, the Blackstone chairman, but this time without Tony Blair. 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 camels 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 pushover. 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 slogging 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: like the world exclusive that one Jay-Z, a billionaire rapper and music entrepreneur and ex–heroin dealer, cheated on his wife, Beyoncé, a singer, and that was the reason her sister kicked him in the shins rather hard while Michael Mailer and I were in the same elevator a few moments before history was made. Had Mikey and I taken the same lift up to the Boom Boom Room ten minutes later, we could have seen history in the making. A billionaire ex–heroin dealer having the shit kicked out of him by a vengeful sister-in-law—how did I get this world exclusive? Easy. The executive editor 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 waiting patiently to interview one of our greatest men ever, and then the poor little Greek boy reading it while riding on the subway. (And if you believe the last item, you believe Jean-Claude Asshole is a great man.)

So, 2017 is drawing to a close and I am very busy organizing my “goodbye to New York” Christmas party, an annual event I give with Michael Mailer. One of our guests of last year will not be attending, Harvey Weinstein, and in a way I feel a coward for not inviting him, but then we have about forty young women coming and if he showed up we’d end up being forty men with no women, so there you have it. Hello girls, goodbye Harvey. Yippee!