I Wish Silvio Berlusconi Was In Office Here

Or at least I wish some of our elected officials could be as unintentionally entertaining as the Italian Prime Minister.

If you are not familiar with Silvio Berlusconi imagine a combination of Hugh Hefner, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdock, and Roberto Benigni. Before becoming Prime Minister in 1994, the billionaire Berlusconi was the owner of a media empire that included television, radio, and print publications that accounted for half of the Italian media.

Such control is helpful within your own realm. Unfortunately El Pais in Spain does not fall under Berlusconi's control and have published a series of photos from one of his parties at his villa in Sardinia. According the TimesOnline the photos show:

Mr Berlusconi accompanied by at least five women in the grounds of the villa; the Italian leader with a young woman in jeans and a pink top; two women, both topless, next to a whirlpool bath and a statue of a nude figure in a landscaped rocky scenery; a naked man with an unidentified woman on a sun-lounger by the side of a pool; and a woman in a red coat and jeans apparently being watched over by a man in a camouflage coat with an automatic gun.

What is interesting is not what the photos display but the reactions of Berlusconi. Berlusconi told an Italian radio station, “I am not frightened. These are innocent photos, there is no scandal, but there has been an aggressive intrusion into my private life."

The unidentified man turned out to be former Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek. Even though he admitted the photo was of him complained it had been doctored.

For more Berlusconi entertainment here are a series of gaffs complies by Time Magazine such as:

"I am the Jesus Christ of politics. I sacrifice myself for everyone."

"Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile."

"Read The Black Book of Communism and you will discover that in the China of Mao, they did not eat children, but had them boiled to fertilize the fields."

Berlusconi made this remark at a 2006 election rally in a misguided attempt to defend himself against accusations that he once said communists in China eat children.

"I trust the intelligence of the Italian people too much to think that there are so many coglioni around who would vote against their own best interests."

The term coglioni literally means "testicles" in Italian and is used as a vulgar term to describe unintelligent people.

"Italy is now a great country to invest in...Today we have fewer communists and those who are still there deny having been one. Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries."

When asked by reporters about a proposal to deploy 300,000 troops to fight crime following a series of sexual assaults in Rome and other cities, Berlusconi responded, "We can't think of deploying a large force. We would have to send as many soldiers as there are beautiful girls. And I don't think we would manage."