King Abdullah II of Jordan visits a Safeway.

From The Washington Times' Inside the Beltway column comes the heartwarming story of a king who is just a Regular Joe...Er, Abdul.

And how does King Abdullah II of Jordan spend his downtime when otherwise not meeting twice this week with President Bush and attending a White House dinner in his honor?

He doesn't do what other tourists do, that's for sure.

Rather, he enjoys frequenting the Safeway supermarket in Georgetown, nicknamed by locals the "Social Safeway."

During one previous trip to Washington, we kid you not, the young king was actually spotted pushing a grocery cart down Safeway's aisles -- loaded to capacity with what one stunned witness described as "junk food."

"He likes to walk around. He's very modest and a people's person," one of the king's men (actually a woman) told Inside the Beltway yesterday. "He went to Safeway this past weekend and walked around the Georgetown Mall."

I'll bet most of his subjects would kill for the chance to even sniff the inside of a Safeway. And that is precisely the problem, king old boy.

In the words of some reggae song from my foggy memory: "Free the people, Mister Leader".