Italian vice and American spice

Sneaking a smoke now and again is not the worst presidential flaw imaginable. The US president is positively monkish compared with Silvio Berlusconi, whose Vesuvial vices spurred a trio of women academics in Italy to write an ‘Appeal to the First Ladies.’ It urges Michelle Obama and other wives of world leaders to boycott next month’s G-8 summit in Italy to protest the Italian prime minister's ‘sexist’ and ‘offensive’ manner toward women.

One of the things the petitioners objected to was Berlusconi's attempt to put up actresses and showgirls as candidates in the European elections (not to mention as allegedly remunerated ornaments for wild parties at his posh villas).

His wife, Veronica Lario, a former actress who is now divorcing him, has operatically upbraided him twice: once two years ago after he had a public flirtation with a TV starlet, whom he later appointed as minister of equal opportunities; and again last month, when Lario charged her randy hubby with ‘consorting with minors’ after he went to the 18th birthday party of a model and gave her a diamond and gold necklace.

Naturally, Berlusconi, who likes to be called “Papi” by his flock of chicks, upped the antics. The paparazzi splashed photos of topless babes -- or “L'harem di Berlusconi,” as they're known -- and a buck naked ex-Czech prime minister romping at Berlusconi's villa in Sardinia.

And a comely 23-year-old starlet named Barbara Montereale told La Repubblica this week that she got paid by a hospital equipment vendor for going to the villa in January -- an incident now under police investigation.

“We played with a little puppy that Bush had given him as a present,” she said. She claimed she went with another girl, an ‘escort’ named Patrizia D'Addario, who told her that she had had sex with the 72-year-old prime minister and asked for a favour about a building project but never got it.

Now a disillusioned D'Addario has released a secret recording she made in which Berlusconi's voice is heard saying: “Go and wait for me in the big bed.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night that Berlusconi, in an interview with the Italian society magazine Chi, which is owned by his holding company, denied that he had ever paid a woman to spend the night with him. “I've never understood what would be the satisfaction if there isn’t the pleasure of conquest,” he said, adding that had “no memory” of D’Addario.

Lingering habit

Given Berlusconi's louche ways, L'Aquila is a safe place for President Barack Obama to indulge his lingering smoking habit. It’s interesting that someone with such daunting discipline can't apply his willpower to cigarettes.

The day after he signed a historic tobacco bill, the president conceded at a White House news conference that he ‘constantly’ struggles with his vice and falls off the wagon sometimes.

He got testy with the McClatchy reporter who asked him about his bill and his habit, pointing out that the legislation was meant to stop “the next generation of kids coming up” from smoking.

Then he got even snippier with Major Garrett of Fox News, who referred to the president's strong opening statement on Iran, noting: “You said about Iran that you were ‘appalled’ and ‘outraged.’ What took you so long to employ those words?”
When CBS News' Chip Reed followed up, asking Obama if he was “influenced at all by John McCain and Lindsey Graham accusing you of being timid and weak,” the president grinned dismissively.

But Obama regularly has to be cajoled by supporters and critics into using bolder rhetoric. It happened in his battle against Hillary during the campaign and with the AIG bonuses and now Iran.

Privately, he gets irritated at those who make him out to be a wimp just because he tends not to react dramatically or visibly to events. That doesn't mean he’s not responding or that he's not tough, he says; it just means he’s not doing it on the timetable or at the decibel levels that some would prefer. Like the Bushes, he will point out, as he did at the news conference, he is the president and his critics are not.
It was enough to make a guy sneak out to the Truman balcony for a smoke....