{"id":197650,"date":"2008-01-19T19:07:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-20T00:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/01\/19\/blair-unfit-to-hold-eu-position\/"},"modified":"2008-01-19T19:07:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-20T00:07:00","slug":"blair-unfit-to-hold-eu-position","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/01\/19\/blair-unfit-to-hold-eu-position\/","title":{"rendered":"Blair Unfit to Hold EU Position"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Honestly, I would not trust him as my pastry chef, but the statements by former French president Val\u00e9ry Giscard d&#8217;Estaing and the former prime minister Edouard Balladur that<a href=\"http:\/\/news.independent.co.uk\/europe\/article3347996.ece\">Tony Blair is <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">unfit<\/span> to be the next EU president<\/a> is rather refreshing.<\/p>\n<p>One of their arguments is technical, they feel that the First EU president (the treaty is going the rounds) should go to a country that is a part of the Euro zone, but the other is that, &#8220;Both men [d&#8217;Estang and Balladur] say Europe&#8217;s first president must come from a country which is fully committed to all EU policies, including the euro. Mr Balladur \u2013 breaking publicly with President Sarkozy \u2013 also says Mr Blair is too close to the United States to be chosen as a &#8220;fitting spokesman for Europe&#8221;. Their views are echoed, off the record, by senior officials in Belgium and Italy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In other words, for this high profile, if largely ceremonial position, he&#8217;s simply Bush&#8217;s Poodle, and nothing can fix that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Honestly, I would not trust him as my pastry chef, but the statements by former French president Val\u00e9ry Giscard d&#8217;Estaing and the former prime minister Edouard Balladur thatTony Blair is unfit to be the next EU president is rather refreshing. One of their arguments is technical, they feel that the First EU president (the treaty &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1010,984,964,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-europe","category-foreign-relations","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197650"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}