This Week’s Emperor of Whackness: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

If you thought George Bush was a raging idiot and the embodiment of the stereotypical American, you haven’t heard of Silvio Berlusconi. Silvio is George's brother from an Italian mother. He personifies every negative stereotype North Americans have about Italian men that you can almost see the gold chain and chest hair and smell the overpowering cologne. He is such a wealth of comedic material, he alone could keep Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher in business for another 10 seasons. Here’s a list of his some of his major offenses:

1. He’s allegedly linked to the Mafia (Think of Tony Soprano running Canada. Foggedaboutit!) .
2. Called Mussolini “a benign dictator who didn’t kill his opponents- he just sent them on holiday”. Right. And Stalin was just misunderstood.
3. He held the 2005 European Food Safety Authority meeting in Italy instead of Finland because “the Finnish don’t know what prosciutto is”.
4. He told Wall Street investors to invest in Italy because Italy “has the most beautiful secretaries in the world”.
5. He claimed that “communists used to eat children” and defended this comment by explaining that “in Communist China children were boiled and their carcasses were used to fertilize fields”.
6. He stated that diplomatic relations between Russia and the US would improve with Obama as the new President of the United States because “Obama is young, tanned and handsome”.
7. He played hide-and-go-seek at an official visit with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. She wasn’t amused.
8. He decided to put thousands of police officers on the streets of major Italian cities to lower the crime rate. He told a journalist that “there would be enough police to avoid the risk of rape [to women]. They would need as many police officers as beautiful women because Italy has so many beautiful women”.
9. He ticks off most of his constituents on a remarkably regular basis.

There’s a lot more, but I’m pretty sure you’re having difficulty keeping your food down. Two days ago Italy suffered a devastating earthquake in the city of L’Aquila. The death toll has surpassed 250 and there are thousands who are injured. Many survivors have had to set up “tent cities” as their homes are no longer fit to live in. Prime Minister Berlusconi visited one of those tent cities and told the people to “pretend you are camping for the weekend”. Um... WHAT?! Needless to say, Mr. Berlusconi has a serious case of foot-in-mouth disease making him totally deserving of this week’s Emperor of Whackness title. All hail!

Here's video of Emperor Berlusconi behaving like a sizzling hot mess: