Wild and crazy
Taki
New York
Ithought Catherine Meyer made the week’s most intelligent remark: ‘If Cabinet ministers can sell their memoirs, why can’t civil servants?’ Or words to that effect. She’s a good German, probably the old-fashioned kind, but the old-fashioned kind has been unpopular since the war, although never with me. Now she’s more unpopular than ever, I presume, her hubby having exposed those clowns passing themselves off as Her Majesty’s ministers. Jack Straw trembling in front of some hamburger-chewing American, and Prescott scratching his head about the Balklands. What a bunch of losers, oy veh!
And speaking of losers, the bureaucrooks in Brussels want to introduce an emissions tax on flyers, as if flying wasn’t already very expensive. What they should do is impose an emissions tax on the flatulent pigs that run the EU, by far the most polluting emissions in the atmosphere. Just think how much pollution is emitted every time, say, Blair opens his mouth. Or Louis Michel, the Belgian cockroach who should have been exterminated but instead became the foreign minister of Belgium.
Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the Cypriot mogul who is the largest shareholder in easyJet, is for the tax. This is crazy, but then Cypriots have been known to do wild and crazy things. Long ago I suggested to a friend of his that, after easyJet became a success, Stelios should start an easyF— escort service, but he has yet to take my advice (£100 an hour all-inclusive, but no meals).
Mind you, there are wild and crazy people everywhere. I read in the Sunday Telegraph that a British film-maker thinks London living spaces are superior to those of New York. Come again? I’ve been looking at the high end of the market for two years now, and most of the places I’ve seen are grubby, barely fit for civilised humans, and expensive as hell. It’s nice to be patriotic, but city housing is not Britain’s strong point. The people, of course, are another matter. Give me my English buddies over here, and the only time I’d show up in London would be for a libel case or two. Which brings me to some more wild and crazy guys, the neocons, who want to change the world in their image. They now have Syria in their sights, and want Hannibal Bush to take out Assad junior. As if Bush didn’t have enough problems. One moron insists that we will never reduce the appeal of Islamist extremism until we totally transform the Middle East. I wonder where his brains are located, although I have a pretty good idea, somewhere south of his belly. Haven’t these geniuses learnt anything from the Iraq disaster? Obviously not. After junior, Syria will be taken over by Islamists, but try to tell that to the sofa samurais screaming for more Anglo–American and Arab blood. Mind you, the Iraqi Talleyrand was here in Noo Yawk and Washington last week, although the schools were not let out, nor were the banks closed for his visit. Ahmed Chalabi was received by everyone who is anyone in DC, including Cheney and Condi Rice. It goes to show how wrong honest Abe got it. You can fool all the people all of the time.
Last month, the Sunday Telegraph reported that a secret poll commissioned by the British military found that 82 per cent of Iraqis were strongly opposed to the presence of foreign troops, and 67 per cent felt less secure than they did under Saddam. Yet here is Chalabi being received like a conquering hero after he hoodwinked everyone in the Bush administration as well as in the Blair one that we were about to be nuked by the high-tech possessed by Saddam baby. If you thought comedy was dead, think again. Here’s a double dealer par excellence, the man who personally enforced the purge of Baath party members, who included teachers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals, thus creating the chaos that followed the fall of the bad guy. Instead of throwing this convicted fraudster in jail, they had Cheney and Condi kiss his you-knowwhat.
Chalabi’s present title is deputy prime minister of Iraq. This is like making Rudolph Hess head of British Intelligence in 1941. But one must take one’s hat off. Chalabi is not only a survivor, he has also talked his way out of all the messes he has got us in and then some. One day he is fleeing Jordan having been convicted of stealing more than 100 million big ones. Then he gets Uncle Sam to enrich him to the tune of 300,000 per month and convinces the good uncle to attack Iraq. After that he is accused of providing classified info to the Iranian ayatollahs, and following that he becomes deputy prime minister. Alcibiades is turning over in envy. All the noble Athenian did was to flee Athens for Sparta, and Sparta for Persia, where he was found and put to death by the Greeks. This prick here is so good at bullshitting he could end up president of greater Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt and even Turkey. Go figure, as they say in Mosul.
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