Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
It’s been a tough few weeks for former Italian Prime Minister and Bunga Bunga-enthusiast Silvio Berlusconi. After being handled for continual leukemia, the getting old lothario was moved out of intensive care earlier this month. That means he can obtain guests, and he has — which no less than provides the poor nurses a break from all that groping.
Among the guests was the mom of Marta Fascina, the 86-year-old Berlusconi’s 32-year-old girlfriend. Nothing uncommon there (by which I imply receiving guests in hospital isn’t uncommon, whereas a 54-year age hole is) besides that Fascina’s mother is known as Angela Della Morte, which interprets as “Angel of Death” — not an excellent identify for a customer whenever you’re simply out of intensive care.
Staying in Italy, it’s been a nasty week for the nation’s tourism ministry, which put out a video that includes a computerized model of Botticelli’s Venus as if she was a — shudder — social media influencer. It additionally contains a group of younger individuals smiling on a patio ingesting wine. How very Italian! Except they aren’t in Italy ingesting Italian wine, they’re in Slovenia ingesting Slovenian wine. Oops.
Our journey eastward continues to Hungary, the place Prime Minister Viktor Orbán continues to supply wonderful worth on the burning tire fireplace that’s Elon Musk’s Twitter. First he responded to a POLITICO article on NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declaring that “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO” with a one-word response: “What?!” It most likely took as lengthy to sort that because it did to determine whether or not to assist Kyiv in its struggle in opposition to the Russian invaders.
Then Orbán visited the Hungexpo exhibition center in Budapest and in addition to taking quite a few selfies with younger individuals, was taken (and, fairly frankly, dreamy-eyed) as he watched a person in conventional costume brandish an enormous whip. Never one to overlook a possibility to look macho, Orbán grabbed the whip and started swirling and cracking it with the fervor of a person imagining he was in a convention room in Brussels being advised the following tranche of EU coronavirus funding had been withheld as a result of of rule-of-law abuses.
He accompanied a video of the whip heroics with the fairly menacing phrase “That’s why you don’t mess with Hungarians” and the sun shades emoji. It was fairly a disturbing sight, though clearly not as dangerous as final month when he visited a pizzeria that serves a dish in his honor with the toppings rooster breast, jalapeño peppers and slices of orange (and sure, the orange is the brand of Orbán’s get together, Fidesz, however that doesn’t make placing it on pizza much less of a hate crime).
CAPTION COMPETITION
“EU-funded remake of ‘Titanic’ suffers from inevitable lack of consensus on who ought to play the Leonardo DiCaprio character.“
Can you do higher? Email [email protected] or on Twitter @pdallisonesque
Last time we gave you this picture:
Thanks for all of the entries. Here’s the very best from our postbag — there’s no prize apart from the reward of laughter, which I feel we will all agree is way extra precious than money or booze.
“Of course I really need to take my pants off as well when I do my elephant impersonation,” by Paul Barrett.
Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot information editor.
