This is confusing.

We have an interim legislative body, not elected but appointed by a military junta. That's not very democratic.

This group of generals got the authority to appoint this legislature not through any constitutional means, but by force of arms. That's not democratic at all, but hey, they're generals, what would they know?

The temporary legislature was given the major task of getting a new constitution written and approved. In the meantime, it would keep the engine of government ticking over until an elected parliament could take up the reins. Not really democratic, but as long as they behaved themselves, it was probably the best we could hope for.

So we have a referendum to approve this constitution but it's held partly under martial law, and the military refuse to explain what happens if the ‘no' votes win. People supporting a ‘no' vote get harassed and the provinces that vote ‘no' suddenly find themselves back under martial law. That sort of looks sort of democratic, but once you scratch the surface, it's not really.

So now we've got a constitution and, despite the shady characters and the likely vote-buying and the one-sided military memos and the relentless picking on the PPP to the point where I'm in danger of feeling sorry for Samak, an election campaign of sorts is underway. So what does the National Legislative Assembly decide to do in the last sunset days before its demise? They go into hyperdrive and start passing laws at a rate never before seen in Thai legislative history.

This is not nuts and bolts stuff without which the taps would run dry. Nor is it minor stuff that will do pro tem until an elected parliament can look at it properly. Nor is it short-term stuff that can be reversed as soon as it looks iffy.

The NLA is busy drafting legislation that seriously affects people's lives. It will make water the property of the state so they can charge farmers for using it. It will make the airwaves the property of the state so that the state can control more easily what news we can get. It will give the Ministry of Agriculture its long-cherished goal of being able to tell farmers what to grow. It will give university administrations, overriding the wishes of the teachers and students, a form of autonomy that will let them fire the teachers and increase the students' fees.

And in the form of the Internal Security Bill, it goes a long way to neutralizing that pseudo-democratic decision that was made back in August when the constitution was approved in the referendum. It's not much use having a constitution protecting rights and freedoms if you then put a law on the books giving Internal Security Operations Command the power to ignore those rights. And immunity from any punishment for doing so.

The NLA already has a track record for trampling on rights and freedoms. They passed a Cyber Crime Law that has Prachatai nervously glancing at the windows, wondering when the goons will start piling through.

Now this is seriously un-democratic.

So on the morning of 12 December a group of people decided to do something about it and tried, peacefully, to shut down the NLA.

Enter Meechai Ruchupan, who must hold the world's constitution-writing record, a man who has served both democratically-elected governments (though he doesn't bother getting elected himself) and dictatorships.

Scurrying back from an interrupted health check-up (I just hope he wasn't in the middle of a proctologic exam when he heard the news), he denounces this attempt to stop an undemocratic Assembly doing some decidedly undemocratic things.

The protestors, he says ‘don't understand the democratic mechanism'.

Erm.

Which democratic mechanism was that exactly? The one that appoints car dealers to parliament just because they have thrown a nice bit of business the way of a constitution-shredding general? The one that conducts a referendum in a blatantly partisan manner to get a constitution passed that ISOC doesn't have to bother about anyway? Or the one that prefers to bulldoze laws through at the rate of 5 a day in preference to waiting just a couple of weeks for a democratically-elected parliament to take over?

It's all very well for a Privy Council President to tell us that this man's an ‘ace legal expert'. But he's obviously working from his own novel definition of democracy.