Let's start the fun:

For, sale. cheap. Italian army rifle, never fired, only dropped once. Italian Army coat, reversible.

"it has not solved the problems of security" Of course it has, we haven't had another "spectacular" attack since when. The poor Italians have to hung their heads in shame after all their sacrifices.

No, ic, in their eyes all the social tensions around immigration and Muslim resentment in Europe stem directly from the fact that the Arabs are so angry about Iraq they just can't control themselves and so trash the beautiful workers' estates the Euros magnanimously set aside for them. It's sort of like the Mid-East is all Israel's fault because little nine year old Abdullah is just so upset his grand-daddy lost the ancestral home in Jaffa that his parents can't do a thing with him.

Q: Why were all the ships in the new Italian Navy built with glass bottoms?

A: So they could see the old Italian Navy.

I have an old friend from high school and we used to have a tradition that has sadly tapered off: Whenever we were in the presence of a group of people, one of us would ask: "What's the first thing an Italian soldier is taught to do?" At which point everybody throws their hands up in the air.

"How many gears has an Italian tank?"

Nine reverse and one forward in case of attack from the rear.

But, it is all nonsense. As John Keegan will attest, Italians fought much more bravely and successfully in Africa and the Mediterranean that our popular war histories would attest and gave the British trouble a-plenty. Furthermore, their (the people's) record of sheltering and saving Jews in WW 11 and of comparative decency in their occupations of southern France and Greece is noteworthy, seeing as they were allied with Germany. It is their politics that is and always has been execrable. We can't have it both ways--demanding strength, virtue and principle while having the humility to understand authority is always a bit of a joke to be mistrusted. They excel at the latter. The former, well...

Could do much worse.

Jokes are jokes, and I have forborn to recount the "Ballad of the Yellow Beret," which is truly vicious.

Peter B's point has some validity, but only some. The Italians in WWII sometimes fought bravely as individuals, but were incompetent as an armed force, with abysmal leadership, logistics and technology. For the most part, they fought like Iraqis and surrendered like Iraqis.

There were some real heroes in the Italian navy, frogmen, small attack boats, things like that.

Even if a bare majority of italian voters have elected a cardboard man, we should honor the service of those Italian troops in the Sandbox.

As I recall, the invasion of Sicily allowed the Germans to escape. We also bombed the mosque...I mean monastary at Monte Cassino. And Gen. Clark's campaign wasn't exactly the stuff of legend.

Yet it never occurred to Bob Dole--or his mother--to use his injury as an indictment against America. And if it weren't for the USA, Prodi might still be the president--of a fashionable German hobnail boot company. Pay It Forward, Prodi.

Monte Cassino has been rebuilt. More to the honor of the Benedictines than the Italians. Maybe they can hold it against the real infidels.

I hear the Canadians are rebuilding Monte Hall.

I'm just slogging through Gay Talese's "Unto the Sons," if ever a book needed a good editor. Talese relates his Sicilian family's history going back several hundred years and then goes into a lot of detail of the senseless and heartbreaking slaughter of a good portion of Italy's young men of the WWI generation many of whom had no idea of why they were fighting, had little training, missing or defective weapons and a leadership with virtually no military expertise.

Perhaps the ordinary foot soldiers were cowards, but then the ambitious and courageous young men had already started to leave Italy for opportunities abroad and many survivors of the War to End All Wars wasted no time following them.

Places like Sicily already poverty stricken by centuries of oppression by foreign rules, came to rely on the funds sent by their sons abroad to keep their farms and villages going.

A couple of millennia ago, the Italians had a kick gluteus maximus army.

There is no shame in what the Italians did, because in Italy the ability to pull the trigger is not held high like it is when compared to the USA. Italians may suck at "freeing" the hell out countries, but what they've accomplished before hand is priceless, Humanism was created in the Italian city states. So quit whinging about how the italians bailed out on America, if you were right, everyone would hate italians- but strangely America is seen as the evil dictator even by the people it doesnt shoot up.