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Article 63 of the Constitution gives us the right to "gather in peace and without weapons". A bit redundant methinks, because you don't go to a peaceful gathering dressed like Rambo anyway, and the laws prohibit arming yourself in public in the first place. Now Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej wants to add useful elaborations to this article, such as you can't "lie" at the rally, or instigate trouble, or use the media to propagate your information, or force or hire others to participate.

In other words, you are doomed if you, say, hold a rally to declare that only one man died in the October 6, 1976 bloodbath. To get such a blatant lie across, you will have to improvise. You may, for example, try to seek political office first and use it to disseminate your information. Since it would come from just one man, the lie would then be constitutional. Problem solved.

The same goes for "instigation". Again, you first need to acquire that priceless label of "elected office-holder" because it's the only indisputable licence to drum up hatred, widen the national divide and launch obscenities at your opponents. Nobody can object if you go on TV to say things like the Thai media are worms that should be stomped on and crushed.

Talking about TV brings us to the "use of media for propaganda". Since Samak's Constitution will prohibit anti-government masses to utilise media outputs, future activists may have to go door to door passing encrypted messages by hand (or via pigeons), which may yet be outlawed anyhow.

Again, if you want to maintain access to modern technology, contest an election and hope your party wins enough seats to monopolise TV prime time. And as always, if critics make any noise, ask them to go back and read the new Constitution. "The charter prohibits protesters from using the media to disseminate propaganda," you may say. "I'm a lone prime minister telling the public what they need to know. What's wrong with that, you sex-starved idiots?"

The "hiring" part got me a bit worried. After all, what constitutes "hiring"? For a future political rally to be legitimate, will participants have to pack their own food and drink, bring their own umbrellas and mobile toilets, paint their own T-shirts and drive their own cars to the demonstration? I mean, what are poor farmers to do if they want to protest?

But we should trust our elected leader to have good reasons and ways out for that. This rule alone will wipe out state-sponsored demonstrations, which have been as widespread as anti-government rallies over the past few years. Moreover, as we have grown tired of the divisive use of same-colour shirts to enhance ideological causes, this problem will be solved because either a "yellow" or "red" campaign can easily be presumed to be a funded event - in other words, one in which the protesters are "hired" to take part.

As someone who has fought state power through political rallies, Samak must have conjured up this charter amendment with a bleeding heart. He must have painfully reflected on all sorts of things, like what could have been if, when he accused the state of "blacklisting" his party last year, the authorities said "You lied" and put him in jail. Or what will happen if, in the future, it's his opponents' turn to take power and he ends up discussing the October 6 death toll on the streets.

The bottom line, though, is that he was democratically elected. That means he can say that commandos are poised to arrest him at the airport on his return from an overseas trip and then, on TV two weeks later, pretend to forget saying such a thing when lambasting the "lying scum" who are his opponents. He has the mandate to instigate hatred, but it will be unconstitutional if you try to make people hate him.

Most of all, he can think up things and "constitutionalise" them, telling us these are what Thailand is all about. This is the way things are in an advanced democracy. If you don't like his constitutional ideas, that's too bad. Stop complaining and try to win an election. That's how you get things done in this country. That's the only way you can go from being a sad, pathetic lying instigator with underground sponsorship to someone so legitimate you can declare your own values as the nation's.