Everyone who is dead, please raise your hand.

Ken Lay has left the building.

Or has he?

As one Houston woman who lost everything said, "I want to see the bastard's body."

For those of you who don't follow multi-million dollar scams that don't have Ocean in the title, Ken Lay and his criminal cronies used Senator Phil Gramm's engineered deregulation (is it a coincidence that Phil's wife, Wendy, was a member of Enron's board?) to steal from employees, investors and California grandmothers. When caught, Ken's wife went on TV and sobbed that things were so bad that they had to sell one of their vacation houses.

The horrors.

But now Ken's shuffled off, joined the choir invisible, he is no more, he has ceased to be.

Or maybe not.

My wife and I often play the game "Who's the Bigger Cynic?" and more often than not, she wins. This time, however, I think I have her beat.

Jenny thinks Kenny Boy is alive, his face surgically-altered (he now looks like David Hasselhoff), living in Lichtenstein, surreptitiously spending his ill-gained gelt.

Ha! What a Pollyanna.

I think Ken's dead. Why? Because it was easier for the Bush family to whack him than it was to let him live, and possibly sing about the private doings of his butt-boy, the President. You can snort a lot of blow off a hooker's ass if you've got access to Enron's private plane, and George had plenty of access, flying all over the place during the 2000 campaign.

So the Bush familia did to Kenny Boy what George 41 did to Bill Casey, dead head of the CIA. See, when Iran-Contra broke open like an overripe melon, some of it threatened to get on Pop. By taking out Bill Casey, George Sr. managed to isolate all blame to Casey and Oliver North, the fall guy who was later rewarded with a cushy gig bloviating on Fox News.

Hey, it worked once. Why not again? So they grease the Kenster, eliminating a potential threat and shut up Jeffrey Skilling at the same time. Beautiful.

My wife is such an amateur.