{"id":142295,"date":"2011-11-17T11:28:02","date_gmt":"2011-11-17T07:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=142295"},"modified":"2011-11-17T11:28:02","modified_gmt":"2011-11-17T07:28:02","slug":"i-treat-drinking-as-normal-pm-comes-clean-on-whether-he-was-drunk-while-making-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/11\/17\/i-treat-drinking-as-normal-pm-comes-clean-on-whether-he-was-drunk-while-making-speech.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;I Treat Drinking as Normal&#8217;: PM Comes Clean on Whether He was Drunk While Making Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>RA Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan&#8217;s grandfather advised never to make friends with people who don&#8217;t drink. The prime minister conveyed these words to reporters after the question and answer period in parliament on Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>Recall, a video (see below) of the PM making a speech Friday at a public event celebrating youth while seemingly drunk went viral in the Armenian blogosphere and social networking sites. Many questioned whether he was indeed drunk.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s why I approach drinking as normal; second, real technical issues arose during that event. Our team, which had prepared the event, hadn&#8217;t taken into consideration that such a technical issue could arise, because the stage was directly in front of our seating area and all the equipment and speakers were far. So when I began to talk, the feedback was so strong and was echoing back to me that I simply couldn&#8217;t hear what sentences I was saying and that, of course, was a drawback our team didn&#8217;t anticipate. They hadn&#8217;t considered that there could be such a problem,&#8221; he explained.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\u00a0<iframe width=\"425\" height=\"344\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/etL7oxKFLTs?wmode=transparent\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen> <\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Tigran Sargsyan said that never has such a thing happened in all his 22 years of making public political speeches \u2014 and this was one lesson he&#8217;s going to learn.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;To be honest, the commotion that resulted was incomprehensible to me. Thousands of people participated in that event, and I hadn&#8217;t gone alone to the event; there were hundreds present; if I was inebriated, all would see and there was nothing to hide. But now everyone&#8217;s saying so what, he was drinking, let him say he was drinking; but now those people who were with me and who saw that I wasn&#8217;t drunk \u2014 wouldn&#8217;t they say that the prime minister is lying? Reporters went and asked everyone in the world if I was or wasn&#8217;t drunk \u2014 [including] those people who were seated next to me. Regretfully, I wasn&#8217;t drunk,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Asked whether he was going to sue anyone for the technical problems, the PM said there&#8217;s no point in fishing for a conspiracy. He expressed a conviction that there&#8217;s no such plot and again assured that they will take into account the experience.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A video of the PM making a speech Friday at a public event celebrating youth while seemingly drunk went viral in the Armenian blogosphere and&#8230;<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":142230,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[65942,14829,34714,34715,11161],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142295"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142295\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}