Things I wish I'd thought of first

Mark Steyn helpfully points out that Palestinian official Saeb Erekat is of course, "democratically elected", being presently in the ninth year of a five-year term. And in like manner, if Yasser Arafat was elected President of the Palestinian Authority in 1996, shouldn't there have been another election by now?

Or is this just the sort of complicated subject that we can't expect the mainstream media to address? After all, it does have more pressing matters of interest to cover, such as the soda preferences of the Democratic presidential candidates.