{"id":1760,"date":"2008-04-15T09:22:15","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T09:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/?p=1760"},"modified":"2008-04-15T09:22:15","modified_gmt":"2008-04-15T09:22:15","slug":"berlusconis-back-huzzah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2008\/04\/berlusconis-back-huzzah\/","title":{"rendered":"Berlusconi&#8217;s back &#8211; huzzah!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Aaaaah! <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/AIRDEF\/idUSL1449363720080414\">Silvio<\/a>&#8230; How I&#8217;ve missed you.<\/p>\n<p>Italian politics had simply got a bit too dull under Prodi, what with him not holding a near monopoly in the Italian media, not trying to blatantly advance his own commercial interests through his high office, not re-writing the country&#8217;s electoral laws to give his own party an advantage, never having compared a German MEP to a Nazi concentration camp guard, having no connections to the Sicilian mafia, not bribing the husband of a British cabinet minister to help him launder money and give false evidence in a trial, and not having been <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Trials_involving_Silvio_Berlusconi\">brought to trial countless times<\/a> for corruption, false accounting, tax fraud and the like &#8211; nor ever being found guilty of perjury in a case involving the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Propaganda_Due\">freemasons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Great entertainment value, is Silvio. Gloriously inappropriate as a national leader for pretty much any European country other than Italy.<\/p>\n<p>(Apologies for not covering the Italian elections much, by the way &#8211; great fun, but far too complicated for a non-expert to attempt to explore in the sort of detail they deserve without spending far more time than I&#8217;ve currently got doing the research&#8230; Here&#8217;s a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/europe\/0,1518,547405,00.html\">handy bit of background<\/a>, though.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Aaaaah! Silvio&#8230; How I&#8217;ve missed you. Italian politics had simply got a bit too dull under Prodi, what with him not holding a near monopoly in the Italian media, not trying to blatantly advance his own commercial interests through his &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2008\/04\/berlusconis-back-huzzah\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[185,181],"class_list":["post-1760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-italy","tag-elections","tag-italy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}