Romano Prodi, an incredibly popular past PM, is running against him next year in the national elections, and if the regional elections are any indication, Berlusconi's party Forza Italia is going to get its butt kicked.

has modeled his admistation's policies explicitly on those of the Reagan and second Bush administrations.

It is asbolutely absurd to suggest otherwise.
No other Italian government in the history of the post-fascist republic has adopted a free-market neo-liberal ideology which so explicitly recalls  the Reagan and Bush administration's drive for the privatizatin of everything on gods' green earth; that borrows on TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMIC THEORY to justify income tax cuts for the wealthy; that wishes to emulate the American model of a strong Presidency with the necessary relative weakening of the legislature as a consequence; which uses the war on terrorism as an excuse to justify anti-immagration and anti-privacy policies, and the list goes on and on.

Italian television is saturated with the sludge and filth of violent pornographic mayhem that Hollywood and the rest of...yes...AMERICAN pop culture pumps out the way Halliburton and the oil companies pump out oil from conqeuered and confiscated Iraqi oil wells.
   Berlusconi is trying (and succeeding) in remodeling  the Italian educational sytem along the lines of the warped and unsalvageable American low-standards, get-out-with-a-degree as fast as you can and get to work making money, money,money
theories..
   He's quite literally copying everything that is wrong with America and pasting it on to an Italian culture with which it is incompatible, both  culturally and socio-economically.
   Following the rules of logic, what I just gave constitutes an unassailable conterexample to your ridicuous unwarrented gerenarilaztion that: "Europe is not copying the US." I can't speak to France, Germany, or the others...However, if you know anything at all about even high-school level logic, you will withdraw that ridiculous universalization because only one counterexample is necceassry to annihilate a universal statement of that nature.
   As to the West being responsible for this and that disaster: again you fail to distinguish.
The war in Iraq, the  single biggest catastrophe of our times, IMO, was opposed by most European regimes. One of the biggest supporters was the fanatical Americanist Silvio Berlusconi.
   I don't undertand the point of your whole dairy entry: if you are saying simply that every nation
in Western civiliation has its dark spots and defects in history and in the present..well, that's a simple truism. Every nation, culture, tribe, or clan in the history of the world has been responsible for horrendous and unspeakable crimes: I challenge you to give me a counterexample against that universalization. Good luck!!!!
     There's no point in discussing and debating a truism, obviously. Your diary basically boils down to a nihilistic and cynical rant against the evils of humanity.I have much sympathy for such a world- view and I'm trying extemely hard to reconcile my own fundamental pessimism about humanity with progressivism in politics. But, that's a philosophical issue and not really appropriate for a political forum.
   Or, if it is,it should be addressed in an analytical philosphical manner: with arguments
and evidence, not obiter dicti and polemical/rhetorical flourishes as is the case with your own diary.
     All that Jerome was saying was this: the bush admistarion is alienating the hell out of European popular opinion; aggareavting the already broiling and brewing antagonism bewtween the two sides of the atlantic. You don't really respond to that, do you? Do you have evidence that suggests the contrary?