Taki's Top Drawer

Mutassim Gaddafi and Hillary Clinton

News to Make One Vomit

This is the most outrageous proposal since Nero named his horse a senator. The suggestion that two of Gaddafi’s sons may inherit his mantle and a deal struck with the coalition is not even material for broken down comedians plying their trade in whore houses. Saif and his brothers have more blood on their hands than even the drugged out paranoid Muammar has. It was they who actually ran the system of murdering ...

Sandra Bullock

From Beautiful Bullock to Ghastly Gaddafi

NEW YORK—They say when sexual attraction sets in, all other brain functions shut down. It’s nature’s way of ensuring procreation. My brain shut down last week, and for a Hollywood actress to boot. Of German extraction, Sandra Bullock is not the classic Aryan goddess, but she’s most attractive in the flesh, more so than on the screen. I ran into her at Michael Mailer’s birthday party. He threw the bash in his famous ...

Anne Roiphe

The Big Bagel Bites Back

NEW YORK—Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for The New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter. He had come up the hard way and made his fortune in Wall Street but retained his loathing for those who had made it the old-fashioned way, mainly by inheriting and the old-boy WASP network. Graydon Carter (no relation), a good friend of mine who went on to become the big poobah at Vanity Fair, ...

Barbarians at the Gate

GSTAAD—I’ve got the end-of-season blues. I know I say this every year, but this has been a particularly fun winter, with friends throwing goodbye parties, dinners, and lunches since the beginning of March. My liver has done a Gaddafi and taken a brutal revenge on my body. The right ankle is doing a Saif as I write. If I stand on it—or, worse, try to walk—it feels what it’s going to feel like when the ghastly Gaddafis ...

Dr. Saif Gaddafi and Mustafa Zarti

Dr. Taki v. Dr. Gaddafi

Up to London to collect my Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. My name is Dr. Taki from now on, and Jeremy Clarke can eat his heart out. If he’d stay out of pubs and do some research instead, he might one day get a Ph.D. like Dr. Gaddafi and Dr. Taki. Actually, my thesis was on the environmentally friendly method of converting Gaddafis into waste. The ceremony did not last long. It took me less time to write my thesis ...

Skiing Around the Bears

GSTAAD—From my study’s wide-open, icicle-covered windows, one feels cocooned from the elements, as if in a prison cell but with the doors unlocked. The snows have finally come. The horizons are totally white. Clouds and snowy peaks intermingle in a rhapsody of snow-white, pine-green, and sky-blue. Thirty-five or so years ago, I took a ski-plane up the Jungfrau, landed on an upward slope, and skied down to Kleine Scheidegg, ...

Ban Ki-moon

Body-Waxing at the United Nations

Remember the old cliché about someone who is perpetually vacillating between a necktie and an open shirt? Or the one about the man who is noticeable for being completely unnoticeable? Step forward Ban Ki-moon, the useless UN's useless Secretary General. Despite persistent allegations that he is a habitual body-waxer, I have always insisted that Moon does not wax because he's Korean. No body hair. Then there were rumors that ...

Oil v. Justice in Libya

I haven’t got that much time left, but I’d gladly give 10 years of my life to see that homicidal maniac Gaddafi strung up from a palm tree alongside his wart-hog sons, especially Hannibal Gaddafi, an expert in imprisoning and torturing helpless servants and beating up women in posh Western hotels. What a ghastly world we live in. Gaddafi has been bullying us for 41 years, his henchmen murdering an English policewoman, ...

You Can”€™t Wax Lyrically About Brazilian Waxing

When a supermarket's decision to put a modesty shield over a magazine cover featuring Elton John, his male lover, and their surrogate baby attracted a fierce backlash from the usual suspects"€”liberal busybodies, professional gay militants, publicity-seekers, and other such rabble"€”I was personally delighted. The star writer of my own Takimag, Jim Goad, was the first to comment on this brouhaha and took a neutral stand. ...

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Honesty is a Virtue (Even in Egypt)

Philosophy is a bit of a struggle for many of us, except, of course, if we’re professional footballers, pop stars, film actors, reality-TV performers, or hedge-fund managers. Although in last week’s Takimag I wrote about Nasser’s Egypt, I forgot to mention that the reason Nasser was so wildly popular with the people was because he was totally incorruptible—as rare as a virgin in a harem where Arab politics is concerned. ...

Taki’s Predictions for Egypt

GSTAAD—Speaking in the House of Commons in 1940, Leo Amery rebuked Neville Chamberlain and his colleagues with the Oliver Cromwell quote, “In the name of God, go.” This was after the fall of France with England on the brink. Those telling Mubarak to go are on the street, not in parliament, which doesn’t exist in the way we know it. I was in Damascus back in 1970 when Hearst correspondent John Harris burst into my room ...

Bernard-Henri Lévy

More Pie for Monsieur Lévy

About fifteen years ago I received a very polite letter from Belgium asking me to list three of the most pompous and self-important people in the UK. It came with a self-addressed return envelope and stamp. The writer was known as l’entarteur, a man who would approach the pompous and vainglorious and shove a pie in their face. He would never insult the victims nor use foul language—in fact, he always remained silent—and ...

Sudan President El-Ferik Ibrahim Abboud visits Scotland, 1964.

Strongmen in Exile

Having spent a great part of my life charting the decline of civilization, I am not surprised at the goings-on in Tunisia, especially as I never considered the place to be civilized. How apt that the arch-crook dictator Ben Ali (Baba) slithered away to Saudi Arabia, itself a beacon of democracy and human rights—especially for women—instead of landing here in good old Helvetia and embarrassing my little community of Gstaad. ...

When Money Dies

GSTAAD—Back in 1975 Adam Ferguson, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, published a very important book with a very apt modern title, When Money Dies. It was about the Weimar hyperinflation nightmare, something our so-called leaders might well think about, which of course they will not. We are so dumbed-down by reality and talent shows on the idiot box, why bother to bring up unpleasant subjects? Only recently I read ...

Natalia Vodianova

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

GSTAAD—Six hours into the New Year, and already there was trouble. My own bash to welcome 2011 with fifty of my nearest and dearest finished around 5 a.m., so I rolled down toward the Palace hotel still looking for some action. I had a very pretty German girl in tow, my son’s friend Fiona, so I swept into the lobby in style. Then it happened. I saw the vision to end all visions and a desperate, sensuous pain, the type that ...

America Should Follow Switzerland on Immigration

OK. Let’s start the new year with a politically incorrect column by telling it like it is, for a change. During the last week of November, in Portland Oregon, the F.B.I. arrested a Somali born U.S. resident as he was about to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in a public square full of mothers and children. Although the authorities were aware of it and had provided the would-be multiple murderer with phony bombs of ...


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