That great father of Iraqi democracy and sometime infidel President Obama, following the "success" of the elections in Iraq, welcomed the progress of democracy in its sunny neighbour Saudi Arabia as "a further sandaled and sandy foothold for Mother Democracy in the Middle East."
The house of al-Saud, who hold their kingdom in an absolute monarchy, have shown their American friends that they are keen to allow the good folk of Saudi a taste of democracy by opening up half the municipal council seats to the democratic process; thereby, in a startling shift of power, wresting absolute control over sewage and garbage collection from the Royal Family.
Although only men can vote for the fifty percent of seats open to election, the other half being by appointment of the Royal Family, and the council being unable to raise revenue or set its own budget, only a mean and twisted mind would see this historic Dawn of Democracy in Saudi as a cynical sop of democratic window dressing, the shop floor full of the same old stock, to sustain Mr Obama's public delusion of a fledgling pan-Arab democratic movement.
The same rotten cynics would probably also ask why the house of al-Saud doesn't open up the Shura Council, a consultative body appointed by the King - think English House of Lords 800 years ago - to elections and grant it legislative powers.
Dismiss these gloomy, crusty communists to the back of your mind and listen to that great paternal ruler of an innocuous sunny people, Crown Prince Abdullah: "We must go slowly, and indeed we are," he warned. "We must not be afraid to stop and look how far my people have come, and then, once the hoo-ha has died down and the sand has settled, go back again to where we started."
But, startlingly, there have been calls from ungrateful communists inside Saudi Arabia for even greater reforms...
Communist activists demonstrated violently in their bedrooms over the weekend, demanding that control of street lighting be passed to the municipal council. In a conciliatory move, Crown Prince Abdullah showed his canniness as a great leader and met the loony lefties half way, granting the municipal council control over the street lighting during daylight hours.
"They may clean and maintain our glorious street lights when the sun, Allah willing, is in its sky," he said in a statement read by his personal shoplifter.
Reacting to criticisms that women have not been allowed to vote, Crown Prince Abdullah admitted that there had been "technical difficulties" at the polling stations.
"Listen, it is perfectly natural for us to have teething troubles with our new, imaginative system of democracy. We must be allowed to develop our own, sunny Saudi style of democracy."
Being no stranger to speaking the truth, he did not deny that the electoral process may seem a little strange to Western observers, but they were merely the product of the fertile, sandy Saudi mind trying to overcome a serious problem.
"The idea came to me late at night, like all of my best ideas. I groped and tossed with this problem for what seemed like minutes, but was, I am told, seconds: How can we prevent communist scoundrels voting twice or even thrice? Then it came, suddenly!"
What came was forth was an ingenious system of voting which almost guarantees the prevention of multiple voting.
Crown Prince Abdullah is proud of his system and shrouds it in publicity: "The procedure for electing a member is simple. One enters the privacy of the voting cubical and inserts one's member in the glory hole of democracy, screeching the name of your chosen candidate to the 'boy of freedom', who then, without haste but with great care, stamps on your member with an ink-padded slippers. This ensures that you only vote once. Nobody I know has two!" He laughed with his natural sunny malice.
So, the march of democracy continues across proud Arabia; different, it is true (would we expect it to be the same as in the West?) - but it still sticks to that age old principle: One member, one vote.
