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Laying into Lay And Then I Would Have Said...By Rick Horowitz
The frail winter sun had barely cleared the horizon, sending a faint golden light streaming toward the Capitol dome. In a marble-encrusted building just across the street, a perfectly groomed man glanced quickly into a small mirror, cleared his throat for the eleventh time and addressed a large but perfectly empty room. "A congressman's life is like a roller-coaster ride," he declared. "Lots of action, plenty of bumps, and sometimes you want to vomit." He paused, then took a pen from his jacket pocket. "Throw up," he murmured. "Sometimes you want to throw up." He scribbled the new words onto the first of several sheets of paper sitting before him, then adjusted -- and readjusted -- his microphone. He turned back to his text as if he had more to say, then stopped and slowly shook his head. His next words were directed not to the absent throng, but to himself. "You'd have nailed him, Cipher. You'd have nailed him good." This would be Wally T. ("Flip") Cipher, debonair heir to the styling-gel millions and mid-level musketeer in Armey's Army. On this particular morning, Congressman Cipher was grappling with a new and especially unfortunate bump: The hearing had been cancelled. The Ken Lay hearing. Sad, but true: Until just a few hours ago, the Soundbite Subcommittee of the House Insinuations and Oversights Committee had been scheduled to hear from the former head of Enron -- or more precisely, he had been scheduled to hear from them. Congressman Cipher was ready for him. Ready to shine. Not that anybody figured Ken Lay would say more than he'd said earlier in the week over on the Senate side: sorry about the collapse, eager to testify, lawyer's advice, agonizing decision, Fifth Amendment, gotta go. But that hardly meant a hearing would be a waste of time, despite what his chairman had said. After all, hadn't the Senate hearing been all over the newscasts that night? Lay sitting there stone-faced, while senator after senator, Democrats and Republicans alike, competed to come up with the most memorable attack line? "Cash-and-carry government," Sen. Hollings had called it. (He'd even called him "Kenny Boy" right there in public!) And what about that Sen. Fitzgerald from Illinois? "I've concluded that you're perhaps the most accomplished confidence man since Charles Ponzi," Fitzgerald had told him. "I'd say you were a carnival barker, except that wouldn't be fair to carnival barkers." Cipher couldn't count how many times he'd heard that one replayed. He'd written it down, and then he'd sat right down and written out some zingers of his own. Short, punchy things with plenty of bite -- that's what the networks wanted to hear. And so, of course, did his constituents. There were tons of angry voters out there, and they needed to see that their elected representatives were every bit as angry as they were. They'd like to give Ken Lay a piece of their mind (most of them had already given him a piece of their retirement), but they'd never get close enough to him to do it. But Congressman Cipher could. And if he didn't, they might turn their anger on him in his next campaign. He certainly didn't need that. Had Enron ever contributed to those campaigns? Absolutely -- but all the more reason for Cipher to get out in front of the posse and swear that he'd seen the error of Lay's ways. Besides, with those new campaign-finance laws just around the corner, lots of the big money was going to dry up anyhow. Going after one rotten-apple corporation wasn't that big a risk. Apple. Fruit. Pits. Congressman Cipher scribbled a few more words, then folded the sheets of paper in half, then in half again, and slipped them into his pocket. He grabbed his cell phone and punched in the numbers for his chief of staff. "Cipher here," he said. "Get me on the Sunday shows." It was a great time to be righteous. Posted 2/14/02. When
they call you to testify about Rick's stuff, just start laughing --
they'll get the point.
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Rick Horowitz
