"I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain / You give something up for everything you gain"

Anyone who knows me will tell you about my undying love for a good bunga bunga party, which is pretty odd considering how anti-social I am. But there's something about an old-fashioned orgy that speaks to me on an almost spiritual level. There's something about being surrounded by naked women that you'll never forget, not that you'd want to.

For the better part of fifteen years now, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been something of an icon to me. Not being the religious sort, I've found that Silvio and his antics fill the place in my heart that Christ does for lesser men.

Of course, any modern gentleman and proper libertine strives always to keep his moral dissolution well out of the sight of the Goddamned Liberal Media, who are typically unsightly and not given to understanding the joy that loose women bring. Sure, you can allow rumours of your sexual superiority to slip into the popular ethos, knowing that the whispered homages to your virility will almost certainly translate into popular and political support. But you never want the facts out there, dig? Some things are just too special to share with a vapid and illiterate public. Unless, y'know, you have a blog.

Silvio managed to circumvent the more annoying practices of the Goddamned Liberal Media by actually owning it. Berlusconi owns all of Italy's private television networks and, as prime minister, controls the state channels. He has little in the way of newsprint holdings, which is fine, since only about 4% of Italians actually read the news. And those that do are swept away by his giving parliamentary seats and cabinet ministries to the hot chicks from his game shows.

The matters that aren't rectified by a monopolistic media empire are easily mitigated by the power of high government office. Italy has a stubbornly independent judiciary - which the prime minister has described as being "anthropologically different from the rest of the human race" - that takes great exception to any number of things. Let's say that you're accused of, I dunno, tax evasion, bribery and mafia ties. The enterprising man about town will simply pass a law giving himself immunity from prosecution while in office.

To be fair, Silvio has been rather restrained in his current mandate. He's kept his political and financial corruption to an absolute minimum. The only real problem he has is that he likes hookers. A lot. And most folks don't even see that as a problem, per se. The prime minister is 74 years old and whores have the magical ability to keep a man young. Mao Zedong knew it, Berlusconi knows it, and now you know it, too.

But there is a balance that needs to be observed. Underage whores should be avoided at all costs, especially when the law enforcement establishment knows that you're, as the late Hunter Thompson once put it, so crooked that you need servants to screw your pants on the morning. The resulting political and legal fallout from statutory rape can age a man rapidly, immediately reversing all of the good works that other prostitutes have done over the years.

This is of course compounded by personally intervening with local police to arrange the release of your busted sluts by saying that she's Hosni Mubarak's niece. That's not only abuse of power and obstruction of justice, but it's also something that can be pretty easily disproved. Not even having one of your MPs introduce legislation to lower the age of consent can fix that.

This seems like a tough fix to get out of, even for someone with Silvio's celebrated Houdini-like prowess. I'm not sure how he survives this, but this is Italy and stranger things happen there as a matter of routine.

But I do know this; Bill Clinton is out there somewhere and he can use a job! He doesn't have the flair of Silvio Berlusconi, but he will keep the bunga bunga alive. And at this point, that's all that really matters.