Michael Ledeen takes apart the left's carping about Italy's Prime Minister Berlusconi. Their complaint, he points out, is a simple one: they are losing. My favorite bits:

As for the celebrated conflict of interest, yes, it is unseemly and perhaps it is even undemocratic in some way for the head of the government to have his own TV channels. But you have to look at the situation in context. Prior to Berlusconi, all Italian television was state-owned, which is to say it was under the control of the government. Which is to say that every Italian prime minister, like virtually every other head of government in the Old World, had the very same conflict of interest as Berlusconi.
. . .
I think the biggest reason for the near-unanimous attack on Berlusconi is that he's often had the courage to speak the truth when the rest of the Eurocrats were cowering behind the conventional wisdom. Two examples stand out. The first was at a European conference shortly after 9/11, when Berlusconi said that Western civilization was clearly superior to the Islamic version. We had freedoms that they did not, we were tolerant and they were not, and we were more creative and more wealthy and more productive. The roof fell in, he was written off as a hopeless paleolith, and he even backed off somewhat.

The second example took place a couple of weeks ago, when he went to Israel and, faced with the usual choice, opted to meet with Sharon instead of Arafat. Not only, but he signed a defense agreement with the Israelis, and then permitted himself a bon mot at the expense of Chirac. Berlusconi had nothing good to say about Palestinian terrorism, and noted that Chirac, by siding with the Palestinians, had "missed a good occasion to remain silent." It will be recalled that Chirac had blasted the "new" European countries for supporting the United States before Operation Iraqi Freedom, and had tried to intimidate the Central Europeans by saying they had missed the opportunity to shut up.

Right, like that well known Lefty publication, the Economist.

Hmm, isn't the real question when the statute of limitations runs out? Or has Ledeen decided that he should decide when the statute runs out. I guess we should forget Andreotti's palling around with the Mafia, too. Plus the fact that Berlusconi's patron of the eighties, Craxi, went into exile in... uh, that haven of all freedom loving, America-phile countries, Libya. Rather than face the measly, tiny, littlest charges against him of gross enrichment, mostly by the state. Which is, incidentally, how Berlusconi's own fortune was made.
As to the argument that state run media tends towards the party in charge -- is this why the right was in charge of Italy from 45 until 91? Interesting.

Berlusconi is a clown, a crook, and a debaucher of Italian politics. And by the way, as another pro-American gesture, he is trying to downplay the liberation of Italy from Mussolini's forces because -- you guessed it -- many of the resistors were communists. Our allies, in fact, during WWII. I'm sure Ledeen is quite happy with that. I mean, we were just on the wrong side, right? With fine anti-communists like Mussolini, Hitler, and various righteous Serbians crusading for free enterprise.