There's an old dictum, "democracy is the right to make the wrong choice", and one suspects there are plenty of wrong choices available out there, but hopefully also a few good ones as we enter the final straight leading to March 24.
When it comes to electing MPs, all that voters wish for is an upright citizen, who will stand up for his or her constituents. Someone prepared to use up every ounce of energy to defend the people's rights. Someone frank, sincere, sober, plain-dealing, truthful, trustworthy and unblemished. An incorruptible candidate of principle, integrity, virtue, moral uprighteousness, temperance and decency.
You see the problem.
Not surprisingly, the reality is somewhat different. For some reason the words evasive, prevaricating, double-dealing, hypocritical and slippery, spring to mind. And those are the good points.
To be fair, it's not much different in Thailand to anywhere else around the globe. As French statesman Charles de Gaulle observed all those years ago: "Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him."
Not-so-magic mushrooms
It would be nice if just one candidate displayed some interest in the sorry saga of the two unfortunate Kalasin mushroom pickers who were jailed after pleading guilty to illegal logging. It is a sad tale, which has renewed the debate about social status when it comes to dealing with the law.
In the latest twist, the couple, who are still in jail, have been ordered to pay a 2.5-million-baht fine which could be reduced if they snitched on who was the "mastermind" in the illegal logging case. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. They clearly haven't got the money to pay the fine and even if they did know the mastermind, if they spilt the beans their fate would not bear thinking about.
Four-legged vote
There are reports that candidates in Bangkok will step up their door-to-door campaigns in the final week. If this is the case, they might be advised to carry a few juicy-looking bones with them.
Although the stray dogs on the main roads are probably politically ambivalent, with no particular affiliation, a lot of the hounds that live behind the doors and gates on estates are very territorial and don't take too kindly to unfamiliar faces.
Certainly the fellow from the Extremely Nice Party had a noisy reception when he came down our soi earlier in the week to explain through crackling loudspeakers that he was the man to lead us to Nirvana. The combination of the loudspeakers and barking dogs made such a dreadful racket it was tempting to enquire what his stance was on noise pollution.
It's tough at the top
In these turbulent times around the globe you wonder why anyone would aspire to be a prime minister, president, dictator, despot, tyrant or whatever. The "before" and "after" pix of former world leaders do not make happy viewing. When Barack Obama became US president, the BBC commented that he was inheriting "the in-tray from Hell", and they weren't far off the mark.
But that scary in-tray could apply to almost any country these days, even Amazing Thailand. Just imagine waking up every morning and realising you are responsible for 69 million Thai citizens, all with some kind of valid grievance. And almost every day there's assorted previously unknown horrors you will have to deal with. It would be enough to make most people roll over and go back to sleep, except you would only suffer nightmares about being stuck in traffic gridlock and the public demanding an immediate solution.
Worst of all, if you are the Premier you can't have holes in your socks or soup stains on your shirt. That would rule me out for a start.
May Day
Watching British Prime Minister Theresa May battling both a frog in her throat and her opponents in Parliament this week would be enough to put most people off from ever taking on the job.
On the first night of the endless Brexit debates she hardly got out her opening words before she broke into a hacking cough, but she gamely carried on with an awful croaking voice which one commentator likened to a Dalek.
It was painful to watch and prompted the Sun's front page headline "Croaky Horror Show". There was little solace for her in the other newspapers, with headlines featuring the words "chaos" "meltdown" and "humiliation".
A comment in The Daily Telegraph summed up just how excruciating Ms May's ordeal was: "It was like some interminable dying scene in an opera, with the soprano shrieking on and on, flailing about madly, coughing and clutching her throat, while the audience sits there, willing it to end, saying in a silent prayer: 'Please let it stop. Get her off! Please…"'
The people's choice
Little did those British citizens who voted "Leave" nearly three years ago, realise that their decision would lead to unprecedented turmoil, featuring back-stabbings and betrayals of Shakespearean proportions.
It was no secret that a majority of MPs had backed the "Remain'' vote. I recall at the time this prompted a wry cartoon in The Daily Telegraph depicting two MPs standing outside Parliament. One of them comments gruffly: "Let's never ask the public for their views again."
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