Comment by ben on previous Berlusconi post:
listen, the whole thing is a hoax. from outside italy i can understand that people's reaction to my saying that is 'come on, berlusconi wouldn't really go that far, would he?' but basically, that's what people have been saying in italy for 15 years, and every time we say it, he promptly shows that he willingly would.
i was dubious about the real feasibility of it all being a hoax at the start, but the following things swung it for me:
1) in terms of attack management, there is no country in the world that would allow its security services to behave like that - the public figure is immediately under the control of security at the slightest risk of bodily harm - "i'll just get out the car again and show everyone my bleeding nose a sec" is absolute pie in the sky.
2) especially when he didn't have a bleeding nose when he got into the car. and when he gets out his henchman has a strange little cannister in his hand, which could plausibly be a kind of red stage paint.
3) he's got so much to gain at this time from public sympathy! he's basically being fingered as a mafia man (by the mafia!), his ex-wife wants €4.5 million a year in maintenance, he didn't manage to block his various trials with ad personam legislation...
4) curiously, tartaglia doesn't actually remember throwing anything at berlusconi.
5) there is a fuzzy video showing someone who might be tartaglia waving a statue around for quite a long time before chucking it. but if he was being videoed, why didn't whoever was videoing him alert security immediately?
6) to be honest, in that fraction of a second in which he seems to be hit by a statue, the flying statue really looks like its going a lot lower than his face. it doesn't necessarily appear even to hit him at all. he then gets in the car without any blood on his face at all.
i would be so pleased to see all this shit come unstuck. all in all, it shows that he is a desperate man in a desperate situation.
Comment on The Berlusconi Attack and its Potential to Breed Conspiracy Theory