R.I.N.P.

Half an hour after reports of Ken Lay's death surfaced, the Wall Street Journal has had this to say in the fourth and longest paragraph of a five-graf story:

"As the Enron prosecutorial effort winds down after four years of forensic digging, it is clear that the government moved quickly in the wake of the 2001 scandal to demonstrate to an angry public that a cop was on the beat, the guilty would be punished and the system purged of corruption."

What an odd sentence. Deep inside words like "demonstrate," the WSJ is code-talking, saying to anyone who's listening that Lay was singled out for doing a slightly worse version of what everyone does. The amount of time and money spent prosecuting Lay and Skilling may be disproportionate to the magnitude of their crimes compared to other white-collar crimes that are barely prosecuted at all, but the idea that they were prosecuted as some sort of puffed-up display of governmental power is absolutely daft. These men ruined an awful lot of people's lives. Rest in no peace.

[UPDATE: The WSJ has replaced its original story with a new version that strikes the above paragraph. But, apparently without irony, the new version includes a sidebar headlined "Road to Judgment Day" that ends with Lay's May 25 conviction.]


FMFM: Lady Soul, which we transferred from vinyl to CD shortly after watching the Tom Dowd movie (again) this weekend. In contrast to the things already being said about Ken Lay almost everywhere but the Wall Street Journal's pages, a lot of people have remarked this week that the late Arif Mardin was the consummate professional. I'll give him a free pass on No Jacket Required and Culture Club. I mean, Dusty In Memphis alone balances a dozen crappy records from the 1980s. May the Karma Chameleon eat up Ken Lay in the next life, and may Arif Mardin be greeted at the gates by a bad-ass rhythm section and a fat retirement fund.