My spoof Democrat letter

My spoof Democrat letter

I read with great interest the open letter submitted to Postbag on Jan 17 by Democrat Party MPs who were griping about how Thailand has ''become a police state'' under Prime Minister Yingluck and how the DSI charges against Mr Abhisit have been politically motivated.

This is my spoof on how the Democrat Party open letter would read if the authors had taken a ''truth'' serum and blurted out everything that was really on their minds:

Dear People,

Please let us now explain in no uncertain terms what the Democrat Party stands for and why supporting us is essential for the survival of our nation.

Firstly, contrary to conventional wisdom, we support free and fair elections so long as it's the Democrat Party that gets to govern. Please remember that the people are often too uneducated to realise what's good for them and, moreover, how important it is that the ''right'' sort of people occupy the corridors of power. We in the Democrat Party have been ordained by God to govern; it's in our DNA, therefore it's our birthright. It is self-evident that elections don't turn out the right results, otherwise the various reincarnations of the now defunct Thai Rak Thai Party wouldn't win any elections at all. There is only one explanation as to why people voted for all these Thaksin-sponsored parties: money. It's an absolute certainty than everyone who ever voted for Thaksin-affiliated parties must have accepted a bribe and anyone who agrees with Thaksin on any points of policy or writes anything that is remotely favourable to Thaksin must be a red-shirt arsonist in disguise. So instead of trying to come up with competing policies or changing the leadership structure within the Democrat Party to convince people to vote for us, we feel our time is much better spent attacking Prime Minister Yingluck for flirting with President Obama and making jokes about how she's unable to speak English in a coherent manner.

Secondly, the Democrat Party is certain that rallying our base is the most effective way to win an election. That's why we've decided to rebrand ourselves the ''We Hate Thaksin Society''. Demonising Thaksin and employing the politics of fear to scare impartial voters into voting for us seem to have worked rather well in the past, but we need to somehow figure out how to do this on a much larger scale because at the moment the red-shirt propaganda machine has been taking us to the cleaners to the point where we can't show our faces in most northern and Isan provinces. In order to increase our party membership by 1 million voters per year, our shadow cabinet has decided that each new member will receive a dart board with Thaksin's face on it and one year's supply of Thaksin voodoo dolls.

Thirdly, the Democrat Party will convince poor people that we like them. The downtrodden and the huddled masses all receive a vote and we have done some intensive research and found out that there are lots of them.

Therefore, although we have huffed and puffed against all forms of populist policies by Thaksin, we have implemented some excellent populist programmes of our own. For example, our economic policy team came up with a well thought out and mind-blowingly complex method to boost GDP by handing 2,000-baht cheques to more than 10 million low-income earners in 2009. We also drastically improved on the Thai Rak Thai 30-baht per person healthcare scheme by making it totally free instead.

We know the public won't be surprised that it took us only five years of endless brainstorming by Oxford graduates in our party before such highly innovative schemes came to life, which is a testament to the deep pool of talent that the Democrat Party can call on.

Last but not least we would like to make it perfectly clear that the Democrat Party is against the politicisation of independent agencies in all its forms.

But how dare the director of the DSI, Khun Tarit Pengdith, press murder charges against Mr Abhisit when we appointed him during our administration for the sole purpose of putting all red-shirt troublemakers behind bars! We made a huge mistake with him thinking he was one of us.

Therefore, we would like to retract all praise we heaped on him back when he was doing his job totally independently by doing exactly what we told him to do.

Yours sincerely,

The Democrat Party

SONGKRAN GRACHANGNETARA
Twitter: @SongkranTalk


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