Stand By Your Man (So You Can Drag Him Through Mud)

Veronica Lario, the scorned wife of Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, has much to learn from Elizabeth Edwards about revenge American style, Alessandra Stanley writes in the New York Times. When Lario filed for divorce and publicly griped about his caddish ways, Berlusconi just turned the tables by demanding a public apology (“And I don’t know if that will be enough,” he added.) Elizabeth, meanwhile, stayed with her cheating hubby, but bested him with the Oprah treatment.

“It’s tempting to see these two political scandals as a contrast of corrupt Europe and puritanical America,” Stanley says. “But that only works under the sexist assumption that it is the men who matter.” Elizabeth’s “star turn” on Oprah “looked more like an exquisite form of revenge,” which, as Americans saw last week, is “a dish best served in public.”
(More Elizabeth Edwards stories.)