All The President's Women

Vice and Spice
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: June 23, 2009
Warning: Link from picture at right is NSFW

Maureen Dowd made her mark and earned her Pulitzer prying over the peccadilloes of a President that couldn't keep his pants on. With our current president hopelessly squeaky clean (except for his occasional cancer stick, which we will discuss later), she has had to focus overseas for a suitably salacious sex scandal. Previously Dowd has fixated on France's Sarkozy, but now she moves down the boot to Italy with a nice Alliteration Alert™.

Our 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 L’Aquila, Italy, to protest the Italian prime minister’s “sexist” and “offensive” manner toward women.

What's so fun about this one is that even the wronged woman is not exactly in the right, since she is a forme mistress of his.

His wife, Veronica Lario, a former actress who met him while she was starring topless in “The Magnificent Cuckold” and 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.

Said birthday girl was one Noemi Letizia. In addition to the 6,000 euro necklace, he gave her a rather creepy souvenir according to a gossip site.

Silvio Berlusconi, 72, also signed a photograph of himself for Noemi Letizia as well as a book in which he had written a goosebumps-raising dedication to her saying: ‘To my little Noemi, my little graphic artist, your little daddy teacher.”

It takes more than some intergenerational hanky-panky to qualify as a scandal in Italy, so it helps that there are call girls to check out.

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.

In her interview (available on YouTube for those of you that speak Italian or just like to watch women speak Italian) she names another woman wishing to exchange favors.

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 favor 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.”

But even all this salacious detail doesn't get Maureen to 800 words, so in clumsy contrast, she excerpts long transcripts of Barack getting the third degree over his smoking habits. And to make the transition, she employs her latest favorite Crossword Puzzle Clue© (which she helped get on the NYT list of most looked up words).

Given Berlusconi’s louche ways, L’Aquila is a safe place for President Obama to indulge his lingering smoking habit.

Maureen has been on Barry's butt over his butts for at least a year. Instead she suggests a closer venue for the random nic-fit.

It was enough to make a guy sneak out to the Truman balcony for a smoke.

But Dowd did make it through an entire column of scandal (big or imagined) without mentioning The Big Dog once. Perhaps she is on the road to recovery.