Sayonara, Berlosconi

G20 leaders (from L) US President Barack Obama, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pose for a family photo during the G20 summit at the ExCel centre, in east London, on April 2, 2009. World leaders meet Thursday for a crunch summit of the Group of 20 richest nations aimed at fixing the crisis-wracked global economy. Photograph by: (ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images)

Time and long past time for the bumptious playboy of Italian politics to drag his sorry backside out of Rome. The man is an absolute juvenile, a social illiterate, a black mould on the carapace of a once-noble country of far-off antiquity. Although he undoubtedly considered himself the emperor of Rome. If we're looking for comparisons, perhaps to Caligula. Berlusconi never did ride a horse into the Italian parliament, but he rode his disreputable horse of disgraceful sexual conquest all over the face of Italy.

The amazing part of all of this is that he managed to be elected not just once, but three times. His vast wealth, and quasi-continental style of cosmopolitan self-confidence and smooth talk along with his public manipulation of the popular news media (which he had ownership of) appears to have successfully blinded Italian voters to his pathetic and egregious excesses. His sloughed-off encounters with illegal activities and successful maneuvering to have court cases where he was accused of dirty dealing suspended, along with his incessant womanizing seemed not to have harmed him one whit.

It seemed that nothing this embarrassing clown could do would be enough to have the electorate in his country finally disown him. There seemed to be no embarrassment when the American First Lady deftly averted a classic kiss of greeting from the man; that his reputation preceded him wherever he went, his feeble attempts at gallantry besmirched by the open knowledge of his cavorting with prostitutes seemed to do him no harm in his country of birth.

Admittedly, Italians must have been fed up with a succession of post-war prime ministers, each lasting a year or so before falling and making way for their successor. And Silvio Berlusconi was a survivor where his predecessors were not. Which speaks, obviously, to the ineptness in general of the Italian body politic, a great corrupt body. A country that can boast it has the fourth-largest economy in Europe, and the eighth-largest in the world, unable to adequately govern itself. Teetering at this point very close to resembling Ireland and Portugal in dire financial straits.

It was not his puerile sexist infantilism, his moral illiteracy, his cloying cosmopolitan sophistication that had Italians finally exhaling a sigh of relief as they cheered "la commedia e finita!" it would seem. But the stranglehold of financial failure in an economy just too big to fail. Too large and cumbersome, in any event, to be handed a financial lifeline from Europe's strained and groaning banking system. Institutionalized bribery, corruption and investigations into same, leading to the collapse of previous governments simply gave Berlusconi an initial entree with his promise to erase all of that from public life.

In the end, under his prime ministership the country was still burdened with the same bureaucracy, the same under-the-table agreements, reform never did occur, and the state debt kept accumulating. As a manager and a steward of the country's affairs he was a dismal failure. As a wealthy man-about-town who had raucous and ribald parties arranged on his behalf with the promise that those who attended could anticipate exciting, illicit sex, he excelled.

Now he can return to his private life, and the country given an opportunity for an autocrat, a financier, an unelected temporary head to attempt to unravel the economic burden left to him to solve. Yet another revolution for Italy.