The End of Bunga Bunga

Americans compare Silvio Berlusconi to the wrong U.S. president.

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Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on April 26, 2011 in Rome, Italy. (Photo by Giorgio Cosulich/Getty Images)

Silvio Berlusconi, a fixture on the Italian political scene for decades who died this week at age 86, wasn’t the predecessor of Donald Trump. He was the successor to Bill Clinton and the predecessor to Harvey Weinstein. 

There was a time, and it was not ancient history, when the most gauche thing you could do in American political life was to take seriously Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct. And that didn’t start with the Monica Lewinsky matter and Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and other misdeeds. It went all the way back to the Democratic primary and the 1992 election. We were told that Americans—Americans in general but conservatives in particular—were hostage to primitive, old-fashioned, Protestant-fundamentalist assumptions about sexual propriety. Great men, Clinton’s defenders said, have great appetites—look at John F. Kennedy!—and everybody in the world understands this except Americans. 

As Anne Swardson wrote from France in the Washington Post in 1998: “It is widely agreed here that this sort of contretemps, whether justified or not, could not happen in France. The public not only tolerates the oft-stated, but unproven, fact that its leaders stray from the strictures of marriage, it does not care, and neither do the media.” A Europe correspondent reported a conversation with one of his overseas colleagues: “I asked how he would he feel if Wim Kok, the Dutch prime minister, confessed to having oral sex with a 21-year-old intern. ‘At his age? We’d all be proud of him.’”

The European attitude, we were lectured at the time, was “sophisticated.” To which I say: Bunga bunga.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    As soon as another left-wing hero politician is caught acting like Bill Clinton again, we’re going to start hearing all that crap about how prudish the right is and how sexual liberation is the way to “unrepress oneself” (or whatever BS thing).

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  2. Betsybowditch

    To beat a dead horse, the great irony of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings is that Hill’s testimony enabled him to get the votes he needed.

    Despite his claims to being a self-made public servant, he had the thinnest resume of anyone nominated to become a Supreme Court justice. It is inconceivable that a white male with his resume would have been chosen. But Thomas was an African-American conservative. When he was nominated GHWB declared, “He is the best person for the job and we’re not going to discriminate against him because he is black.” They had a video “The Man From Pinpoint” to introduce him.

    His initial appearances before the Judiciary Committee did not create a good impression. He looked nervous and didn’t seem to be familiar with major cases that had come before the court. But after Hill’s testimony, he came back as forceful in defending his honor. My mother, no fan of the man, felt he came across much better. He called the hearings “a high-tech lynching” and “disgraceful,” Trump’s favorable word.

    Thomas implied the next thing people would want to know is about his private relations with his wife. Nobody wanted to go there and it struck me as a dodge. He was never asked under oath about Hill’s specific claims or whether he watched pornography by the committee, which had another former employee approach them. She was an attractive secretary who claimed Thomas had showed up at her house to ask her bra size. But she had also filed discrimination lawsuits and they didn’t use her.

    Hill was pretty squeaky clean but she was vulnerable to be tainted as a sex-starved spinster, which is what happened. (One of Thomas’ friends testified he had met her on the street in DC and she had asked him, “Why haven’t you called me?”) She, like Thomas came from humble origins, Her parents were in the gallery during her testimony and it was the first time in their lives they had flown on an airplane or been to the capital.

    I disagree with my father that they both feel they are telling the truth "because men and women see these things so differently." I believe the preponderance of evidence favors Hill. But unless one comes forward and acknowledges lying it will remain a “he said, she said.”

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    1. Neelthakrebew

      Back then nearly all Supreme Court nominees got confirmed. I don't want to research the percentages, but I was not under the impression that Thomas was in any trouble at all until Hill showed up. BTW, I totally believe Hill's testimony, And hoped that Thomas would not be confirmed.

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      1. Betsybowditch

        Most of the nominees have a paper trail of publications/decisions because they either come from academia, less likely now, or the judicial system. As a 43-year-old, young at the time but not today when the appointment of a younger person ensures they will be able to serve for decades, with barely one year of experience serving on the US Court of Appeals for DC, Thomas lacked the usual experience having made his career in the federal bureaucracy where his assistant had been Anita Hill.

        The American Bar Association gave Thomas a passing grade of “qualified,” but its endorsement fell short of the “well-qualified” ratings received by other high court nominees including David Souter, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia.

        In 2005 GWB nominated his WH Counsel, Harriet Miers, who had previously served in other capacities in the WH and Texas, to replace retiring Sandra Day O'Connor, who also got a qualified rating but that likely owed to her work history in the state court system. The first female justice, she was confirmed unanimously. Miers was less qualified than Thomas to serve on the high court and initially GWB claimed, "If you question her qualifications, you are sexist."

        The furor was really on the Right because she did not have conservative bona fides, which Thomas did. The Senate was controlled by Republicans but they balked and her nomination was withdrawn and Samuel Alito was put forward.

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  3. Pschneider_9332

    When you find yourself plagiarizing Frank Bruni*, maybe it's time to push away from the keyboard and go on retreat. (NOT to a Ukrainian Minder Monastery)

    Unless of course you want his job.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/opinion/trump-berlusconi.html

    *"And it’s worth dwelling a bit longer on those shared traits, because they point to verities bigger than the both of them — to dynamics that will play out in Western politics for some time...Trump, too...Another Berlusconi-Trump lesson..." (Ibid.)

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  4. Avatar photo
    Bayesian

    Hopefully someone with a better memory than mine will be able to point to the many social conservative denunciations of Newt Gingrich's [lack of] character on the occasion of his 2012 run (if not earlier - IIRC his six year long affair with Callista** become public in the process of his 2009 civil divorce).

    NR in their 12/14/2011 edition arguing against Gingrich for various reasons includes this gem in the lead editorial

    "We fear that to nominate former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the frontrunner in the polls, would be to blow this opportunity. We say that mindful of his opponents’ imperfections — and of his own virtues, which have been on display during his amazing comeback. Very few people with a personal history like his — two divorces, two marriages to former mistresses — have ever tried running for president. "

    For that last sentence, note that it was 3.5 years pre-Trump. Note also that other than it possibly being an electoral liability, nobody in that issue seems to consider the character implied by Newt's "personal history" as a particularly worrisome matter.

    ** Is not Callista Gingrich being Trump's Ambassador to the Holy See one of the most perfectly Trumpy/post-2016 Republican things things ever?

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  5. Avatar photo
    Flwehr

    “…keep a Mike Pence or a Ted Cruz around like an organ-grinder’s monkey to dance for the rubes in the pews.”. Perfect, thanks for the coffee up my nose.

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    1. Vance Pomeroy

      In our house, we call it "Beverage Alert!"

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    Michelle O

    "I don’t know if Berlusconi liked beer at all, but he did once share a bottle of ’75 Jeres de la Frontera—to be clear, that’s 1775—with Vladimir Putin on a tour of Russian-occupied Crimea. It wasn’t Berlusconi’s wine, of course—he just saw the bottle, which had been brought to Crimea by Count Mikhail Vorontsov during the reign of Catherine the Great, and opened it."

    I weep not because Berlusconi had the balls to drink the 250-year-old sherry (someone ought to, after all) but because I wish I could try it.

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  7. Halvor

    Clinton had the genius needed to wage a strategic retreat in the face of the Republican Revolution. He nearly stalled them out, until SCOTUS elected W. Clinton's personality is folklore. His playbook for resistance to reaction will be as perennial as the Anabasis of Xenophon. But would the Democratic Party -- and social democracy -- be better off today if Clinton had been vanquished by Gingrich? Yes, after a lot more suffering. (Obama was the stone the builders rejected.)

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  8. Pohl

    Good article. Funny. Classic Kevin.

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  9. Pishposh

    I cannot tell you how much I love the fact that you titled this article with what I think is a Futurama reference, i.e. the GREATEST TV SHOW OF ALL TIME!!!! Nevermind... that was Snu Snu...

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  10. Avatar photo
    Chevesl

    One of misogyny’s greatest cons was “great men cannot be constrained to monogamy.” Unlike us testosterone-deficient normals, Real Men’s desire to bump uglies connotes an incorrigible masculine nobility. But what of the products of the bumping—do they admire their fathers? Does Ivanka or Chelsea think it’s admirable that their fathers left so many destructive (and literal) stains behind? Have you ever heard one of the Great Men’s kids say, “Dad was too much of a real man to keep it in his pants for Mom”?

    Nope.

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    1. Neelthakrebew

      Well, some of those who want to distance themselves from their fathers have changed their names--like Patti Davis--but Chelsea and Ivanka have not.

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    2. BenP

      Well said. Christian Walker, son of Herschel, comes to mind.

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    3. Avatar photo
      Rdoconnell

      Well said. Impulse control is the hardest thing in the world. And I thought "real men" take great pride in doing that which is difficult.

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    4. Val Xavier

      Power, not appetite, explains the sexual escapades of certain historical figures. That's why it's generally so gross and worthy of scorn.

      Explaining it away as "well he's a man, and a powerful one at that, so we shouldn't expect him to control himself" is misandry of the first order, but we're so consumed with power worship we think it's actually cute for the powerful to indulge their all-too-common vulgarities. Based on what we saw in the 90's, I expect most of us would have excused dropping trou and peeing on a tree too. "He's just too busy and powerful to use the facilities like the rest of us..."

      We also have a REALLY bad habit as Americans of confusing power and *responsibility.* Our Executive branch of government has much more do with the latter than it does the former. But we're not literate enough to insist on candidates for executive offices to reasonably expect such integrity. We usually run the servant-leaders off because we think they're too weak, or they don't seem powerful enough. That's nobody's fault but our own. We get what we tolerate. As noted prior, we are in *serious* trouble.

      A real man, it has been said, is he who does what needs to be done. I'm pretty sure schtupping the interns and prospective starlets is not a necessary duty.

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