Pila- No need to apologize for a rant; that's certainly your perogative. However, I definitely disagree with your "to say otherwise is just idiotic..." - I think you're way off-base there.
For example - let's try to take the emotion out of the Portugal loss versus France for a minute (not easy!). If you remove the hand-ball - you have a 1-1 game. Was the 1st touch before the pass to Henry offside? Yes - but the play was still going, and Portugal was still defending...and France still scored. So you have a pretty even 1-1 game going to penalty kicks. What if the hand-ball hadn't been called and the game went to penalty kicks and Portugal lost the shootout? Would we still be saying the better team was robbed? I don't think so. We'd still be bummed at the loss, but I don't think we'd have this collective sense of injustice and loss that we're all experiencing now.
With Italia - I invite you to watch any championship-winning Italian side this century and show me an all-offensive creative side that dominates the offensive play for the majority of the game. Good luck! They play a defensive style, just as the great German teams played a rigid & precise style, and the great Brasilian teams played their "beautiful game". You can argue the method, but you cannot argue the results. I give you RedEagle's beloved two-time Stanley Cup Champion New Jersey Devils as Exhibit B; a different sport, but the same principle. They play defensive, trapping hockey. It's neither creative or very entertaining to watch for the casual hockey fan with most games being 1-0 or 2-1 results. But at some point you have to tip your hat to the Devils for having the discipline and the technique necessariy to play defensively at that high a level for an 82-game season (for those of us who have played hockey, we can tell you it's not that easy).
So my point is - if Italia has a game plan that they have drawn up, deploy it to perfection, and win championships with it - who's to say they don't deserve it?