Nature will take care of one in the foreseeable future, and then change will be inevitable.

I am not so sure of how to get rid of the other tyrant.
I wish we could believe him when he says things like this:

Meanwhile, Thaksin yesterday vowed to steer clear of politics. He said he would “never, ever again” enter politics.
“I’ve had enough,” he told Thai Public Broadcasting Service television while at a Hong Kong shopping mall.

Looks like the ‘invisible hand’ will be around for a few more decades yat.

We should at least come up with a scathing, original nickname for Samak.

A part of me, though, understands AW’s stance somewhat. Thai politics is not polarized in the pro-Thaksin/anti-Thaksin axis, but also on the royalist/Republican axis and sometimes choosing to be one nudges you to choose being pro-Thaksin because you hope in the back of your mind that we’ll get rid of one entrenched tyrant first, then we’ll get rid of the other less entrenched one. Sort of the side effect of the silence around monarchy, really. Things in Thai politics are (have to be?) done in a roundabout, obtuse, and ends-justify-the-means way and those cheering on the sidelines will hope along the same ends-justify-the-means lines.

Just thinking out loud.

On the other matter, yes there is (justified) criticism of PPP here, but AW seems a little reluctant to comment on PPP, whereas I seem to recall he was not so hesitant when it came to the ‘Old Ginger’ cabinet and the ‘Democrat-except-when-we-cannot-win-an-election-and-then-a-coup-is-ok Party’.

I concede that both AW & Republican have commented on Samak’s Oct 6 lies, although I must have missed their commentary on other recent events such as Samak on Tak Bai, Samak & Chalerm on W-O-D, Jakrapob’s media interference, Sunai’s transfer etc

And yes, the Bangkok elite continues to deserve criticism for supporting and manufacturing a military coup and a constitution that demands coalition government and continued corruption in politics. They are to blame. But that doesn’t make Samak and PPP a party of angels. PPP is the Frankenstein creation of an elite strategy that failed. The outcome is likely to be increasingly awful. But maybe that is what the elite wants?

They haven’t given up trying to manipulate events and outcomes. It seems clear that there are elite manipulators who believe that by helping to make the PPP look really, really bad and by nibbling away at their numbers in parliament that the outcome might be a coalition led by Democrats.

The elite seems prepared to take the long road home, but certainly not the high road.

Please start with the new War on Drugs “populist” policy.

I look forward to AW’s (and the other PPP cheerleaders) take on recent events, and wonder if they are still going to blame those Bangkok elites and the ‘invisible hand’ for everything?

Seems like he thinks the country is better dead than capitalist. Tell that to Vietnam and China. Luckily democracy will save Thailand from rich pretentious elite fools like him. No wonder he and the democrats have given up on elections, any Tuk Tuk driver can see right through this self-serving drivel

And the only fact he cites in his moronic rant is wrong. Public debt burdens went down under Thaksin.

“Do not regard the past one year and four months as a waste of time. In fact, it has been a blessing in disguise. It has helped slow down certain economic rhythms. The economy might not have moved fast but it adjusted the unbalanced growth”…

The country’s economy has not totally lost out under the administration as it helped slow down the imbalance in the economy, including a stream of bilateral agreements, said Mr Supachai.

The economic adjustment helped reduce public debt burdens which had been driven by the Thaksin Shinawatra government’s populist policies and views on bilateral trade agreements.

2. Any research or investigative journalism that shows how “populist” programme funds are used and what benefits come from them, is surely necessary for meaningful debate…if this info is not available, both positive and negative, then garbage in, garbage out, as computer programmers say…too often an issue gets its 15 seconds of media coverage one day as breaking news, only to be forgotten about, anyone who can describe the economics of Thailand’s agricultural commodity markets, for instance, surely deserves a prize, but…

3. Supachai’s right. The coup was a blessing in disguise.