Welcome to the Free World

Despite the increasing openness of their country to American profiteering, it appears that some uppity Africans still have much to learn about the meaning of the word democracy. The Ethiopian government was elected with a hundred per cent of parliamentary seats, much as the two right wings of the US business party tend to do fairly well in the fledgling Dynastic Republic's quadrennial balloon-fests. Although the US registered concern during the election about restrictions on civil libertes and free speech, President Obama has now officially legitimised the Ethiopian government by conferring upon it the World Cop's merit badge, to the disgust of various far-left and backsliding persons who seem to think democracy has something to do with representation of the great unwashed or, worse yet, the numerous impecunious. Speaking at the palace of that great freedom fighter, Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian prime minister settled the matter by referring to his country as a "fledgling democracy", the term favoured by the Reagan administration for its pet death-squad polities in Central America.