Key ' Red Shirt' Minister Nattawut Rejects Military's Call For Break On Amnesty Law

By bringing the smaller parties into an unneeded coalition, and throwing in a few token cabinet posts, it spreads the patronage, and effectively cuts down on the plotting against Team Thaksin for leaving them out of the Trough-Fest. A happy snout in the trough, doesn't try to become top pig, or work with other sub-bovines to topple the top pig, with an alternate alpha pig in the lead.

They have tried this with selected army leaders to, in less obvious ways, but not uniformly so. Just as the political scene is pockmarked with small scrabbling parties, so the army resembles a small pox survivors body, scared from recurrent pustules, all waiting to be scratched and start up yet again the fever to take over, come power, money to manipulate an annual reshuffle.