One line, nothing to do with the rest of this post caught my attention. You refer to La Repubblica as being an anti-Catholic newspaper. In political terms, what does that mean?
Left-of-centre secularist, inheriting Italy's ancient anti-clerical and Freemason traditions, and with an animus against the Church's perceived political power.
Irresponsibility and infantilism are at any rate a common and unfortunate strand of the modern Italian character.
I read an article two or so months ago by a female Italian journalist, writing about Burlusconi, in which she said something to the effect that Italian mothers raise their children to be promiscuous manchildren who make a lot of noise and wave their phalluses around, and that no Italian expects anything different from an Italian man, even (or especially) a prime minister. Only she somehow said in a way that was not derogatory. I can't remember how she said it. Anyway, because of this, she said, even if Berlusconi was absolutely proved to be using public money to buy sex from a teenage girl (as the worst version of current rumor suggested), he would never suffer in public opinion for it.
At the time I found her article very distasteful and closed the window, but you make me wonder if perhaps Italy really is that way.
He did not use public money - that is the whole thing. In fact, the woman concerned was procured by a bureaucrat who was regarded as a member of the opposite political group, and it is this bureaucrat who is being investigated for things well beyond procuring. He is a high figure in the Puglia health service, against whom very serious allegations of corruption have been made. The hiring of the prostitutes simply seems to have been a kind of favour to the PM.
I think you misunderstood the emphasis of my comment. What I found distasteful wasn't whether the allegations being batted around at the time (as I said, this was the worst version of several months ago) were true, but the commentator's assertion that if they were true about an Italian politician, it would not damage him.
I mean, for an American politician, simply getting caught cheating on your wife with someone of your own age will do serious damage, even if it will not necessarily end your career. The bingo board combination in the most scurrilous version bouncing around then (use of public money AND paying for sex AND sex with an underage girl) struck my American sensibilities as completely over the top, because any single one of those would without question end someone's career in the states (unless perhaps you were running in Washington DC). To combine the three seemed overkill writ large.
So for this commentator to claim that Italians wouldn't care (again, if it were true, as you say it has been proven false), frankly, gave
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No, they would not. That is why the Berlusconi derangement syndrome brigade spent so much time and effort into trying desperately to prove it was true. Failing any kind of evidence, they have thrown themselves into hysterical demands that Berlusconi himself should "clear things up by a statement" - where he had already made one or two statements, wholly negative. And if Berlusconi had indeed gone to bed with an underage girl (bear in mind that the prostitute with whom he admits going to bed is quite glamorous, but 42) there would have been Hell to pay. But it was not the truth and nobody actually had the nerve to state it in those terms. It was all done by innuendo and suggestion. Had they stated it for a fact, they would have been sued into next week by the girl's family, let alone Berlusconi. It all began with a complaint by Berlusconi's soon to be divorced second wife (I'm not going to get here into correct Catholic language and say that there is no such thing as a second wife; I'm just using ordinary language) that he would
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I read an article two or so months ago by a female Italian journalist, writing about Burlusconi, in which she said something to the effect that Italian mothers raise their children to be promiscuous manchildren who make a lot of noise and wave their phalluses around, and that no Italian expects anything different from an Italian man, even (or especially) a prime minister. Only she somehow said in a way that was not derogatory. I can't remember how she said it. Anyway, because of this, she said, even if Berlusconi was absolutely proved to be using public money to buy sex from a teenage girl (as the worst version of current rumor suggested), he would never suffer in public opinion for it.
At the time I found her article very distasteful and closed the window, but you make me wonder if perhaps Italy really is that way.
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I mean, for an American politician, simply getting caught cheating on your wife with someone of your own age will do serious damage, even if it will not necessarily end your career. The bingo board combination in the most scurrilous version bouncing around then (use of public money AND paying for sex AND sex with an underage girl) struck my American sensibilities as completely over the top, because any single one of those would without question end someone's career in the states (unless perhaps you were running in Washington DC). To combine the three seemed overkill writ large.
So for this commentator to claim that Italians wouldn't care (again, if it were true, as you say it has been proven false), frankly, gave ( ... )
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