There is only so many times a person can roll their eyes before they start to develop a headache. But when watching the volume of alleged criminal accusations being leveled against former Prime Minister Abhisit and members of his Cabinet, a person familiar with behavior patterns of Thaksin Shinawatra can fairly easily connect the two together.
Lets face it, things are not exactly going as planned for Thaksin. In fact they are not going well at all. His biggest sticking point is getting the Constitution changed, but the number of votes is simply not there. The people who he must convince are more educated than the people who he can easily trick to follow his lead. The polls show that at best Thaksin may get 75% of the votes needed to start that Constitution changing process. So because of that it does not take a rocket scientist to conclude Thaksin is boiling mad.
So enter into the picture the history of how so called independent watch dog and go after the bad guys people tend to fall in line behind the government in power at any given moment. How and why that happens is more or less irrelevant for this entry, but the fact that it happens is totally relevant. Couple that fact with an angry Thaksin and you can start to see what looks like a temper tantrum coupled with a self serving objective.
So doing a quick tally we see the following, Abhisit is accused of murder totally ignoring that he is both protected and mandated by the Constitution as well as the Thai courts to restore order in Thailand when the Red Shirts started to run amok. Fortunately Abhisit had the foresight to know that some day there would be a power shift, so getting the courts to sign off on the need to take action makes Abhisit bullet proof.
There was also an announcement of potential additional murder charges that would also run into the same court and Constitutional dead ends. The fact that this was publicly announced lacked any shred of professionalism and only served political gains for Thaksin by making bad press for Abhisit.
Abhisit was also stripped of rank and a few other things. This is still pending the courts ruling if this was overstepping of authority to strip Abhisit. Odds are it was overstepping but we will wait for the court’s ruling.
From here on it looks like if it is not nailed or bolted down, throw it at Abhisit. Various announcements about being investigated for this and for that are finding their way into the media. As it would be, most of not all of these additional accusations ride on the assumption Abhisit is not protected by the Constitution and the court’s mandate. So simply 0+0=0, but the chance to talk to the press to make the accusations of potential crimes does cause a seed of doubt to be planted.
As for the underlying reason for all of this, we are not the first to point this out. This is all passive pressure on Abhisit to buy into the amnesty package that also will get Thaksin off the hook. Needless to say, it does not look like that will happen as zero plus zero still equals zero.
