{"id":1066,"date":"2005-02-10T15:40:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-10T15:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2005-02-10T15:40:00","modified_gmt":"2005-02-10T15:40:00","slug":"1066","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=1066","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>DEMOCRACY&#8217;S RIPPLE EFFECT<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Following on the heels of Iraq&#8217;s historic election.<a href=\"http:\/\/story.news.yahoo.com\/news?tmpl=story&#038;cid=535&amp;ncid=535&#038;e=5&amp;u=\/ap\/20050210\/ap_on_re_mi_ea\/saudi_elections\">The House of Saud dips its toe into democratic waters.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>A lot of the quotes in the article are heartwarming. We should remember however that this was in a) a major urban center b) the reporter spoke to a lot of people with advanced degrees and most likely to hold liberal views and speak English and c) the scope of the franchise and offices was severely restricted. Nevertheless, it&#8217;s a good start and it is worthy of praise from the United States and Western countries. The al-Saud have been toying with this idea for several years but the positive outcome in Iraq certainly added an impetus by removing some of the likely objections of non-extremist Saudi conservatives.<\/p>\n<p>On a personal note any further blogging today will have to wait until very late this evening. I am totally swamped with meetings and projects at work and a bombastic tantrum is probably in the offing.<br \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>DEMOCRACY&#8217;S RIPPLE EFFECT Following on the heels of Iraq&#8217;s historic election.The House of Saud dips its toe into democratic waters. A lot of the quotes in the article are heartwarming. We should remember however that this was in a) a major urban center b) the reporter spoke to a lot of people with advanced degrees [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}