Cooking Thaksin’s books to hide his income is nothing new for Thaksin as he always looks to hide his wealth. But now when it comes to showing how much support he has, he is cooking his popularity books to inflate the numbers.
All the telltale signs are there, Thaksin support is way down after the Songkran riots. All those security cameras that were installed after the rash of bombings have paid for themselves as people see with their own eyes. The desperate attempts by the Pheu Thai Party (PTP) to say the images were fake have fallen on deaf ears to all but the most blind.
Seeing that Thaksin’s support was in the low 20s before all of this, without seeing a poll one can estimate mid teens. The fact that a a mass rally in Udon Thani was canceled citing they expected people to come and make trouble. Seeing that Udon Thani it the heart of pro Thaksin country, that signals problems. More realistically the story is more like nobody but hardcore supporters will show.
There was a huge PR campaign launched by Thaksin that included red T-shirts saying I was not paid to attend the rally. In the end that just turned out to be another lie. Although some did come of their own free will, not nearly the numbers claimed. The push by the red shirt leaders to donate the governments 2000 Baht stimulus checks to the red shirt cause, while only a few fools did, the rest went into the pockets of the people who attended the rally.
The news has reported that at least 100 members if the PTP want to jump ship and find another party for the next elections and that is well over 50%. Needless to say things are not looking good for Thaksin of you look past the cover story at the facts.
On the other side of the coin the people that remain loyal to Thaksin are of the most radical and most dangerous. This is certainly to prove the 80:20 theory that 80% of the problems come from 20% of the people. Thaksin’s fastest crony Jakrapob Penkair has openly been sanctioning violence, red shirt rallies were announced just hours after the state of emergency in Bangkok was lifted.
This smaller number and more dangerous group can certainly make a lot of trouble in a variety of ways. Seeing that Thaksin does not care about the consequences to others, anything from more assassination attempts right on down the line is likely to happen. Anyone that Thaksin can recite their name from memory is on that short list, and Connecting the Dots thinks there are between 80 and 100 people on that short list. The list includes Constitutional Court judges, other politicians, PAD leaders to name a few.
Thaksin is very angry and although he still tries to get as much media time as he can to lie to people, he is a multi tasking person. Expect anything that an angry man would do to hurt his enemies, and you will know what tomorrow’s news will be.
