Interior Minister Chalerm Yoobamrung is on a mission. On Tuesday, he announced that he would use a security law to shut down what have become Thailand’s top 29 websites, after several sources listed the offending URLs. Many of the websites have already been taken down by their owners, but some are still rampaging against all that is good and all that is heavenly.

It was actually the Democrats who called for the 29 websites to be banned, but Chalerm was quick on the mark, immediately blaming ISPs for allowing such dreadful content to be broadcast to the masses.

At the time of writing, you can still access many of the websites. What has actually happened here is that Chalerm and the Democrats have joined forces to give the ultimate publicity to websites that they supposedly see as threats to national security.

The sensible thing to do, from their positions, would have been for this whole debacle to go on behind closed doors. If the websites are a threat, block them, but don’t leave it open to public debate, which highlights how incompetent those involved truly are.

Those 29 websites have seen their popularity soar. People who would otherwise never have found them are now browsing through the archives, seeing what all the fuss is about.

Meanwhile, Chalerm is back on the move, vowing to arrest “a mastermind behind Internet messages deemed offensive to the monarchy”. WTF? A mastermind?

“In no more 72 hours I should have the outcome of tracing who is behind the posting of inappropriate messages in the Internet,” said Chalerm, as quoted in The Nation.

I must have missed the part when it was reported who this mastermind is and what he or she has done.

God speed, Chalerm.