Wednesday, September 10, 2008

What's cooking in Thailand?

On Tuesday night I found the news on JOTMAN. Thai Prime Minister Samek Sundaravej was forced to resign by Thailand's Constitutional Court.

As I reported at the beginning of this month, demonstrators have been trying to force Samek's resignation on the grounds that he was corrupt.

Now we in the United States have also seen some of our citizens call for the impeachment of our own president, George W. Bush. Given that I've always thought that Bush's behavior was sort of business-as-usual for the US empire, I've never been real big on impeaching him. The real problem is lots bigger than ol' W. But there's no denying the seriousness of the charges. We're talking things like starting the disastrous Iraq War on false pretenses, warrantless surveillance of US citizens, or dismissing US attorneys for political reasons. And the list goes on.

So what, may you wonder, were the grounds on which the Thai Constitutional Court ordered Prime Minister Samek to resign?

Um, it seems that the court thought he violated a provision of the Thai Constitution that forbids someone from accepting private employment while serving as Prime Minister. According to JOTMAN, Samek appeared on a few episodes of a cooking show on Thai television.

For more details, here's a link to a New York Times post that I found courtesy of JOTMAN. It has lots of background information, and seems to have other interesting links.

Because Samek's PPP party seems intent on re-nominating Samek to the post of prime minister, this ruling is unlikely to end the current Thai controvery, the Times reported.

I have an idea. Given that the anti-Samek protesters think that Thailand has too much democracy, maybe they'd like to have George W. for their prime minister? Maybe we could arrange some kind of a trade?

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