TNR’s “Notebook” has a nice little item on the Ken Lay Senate hearings, “American Grandstand.” The gist:

It takes special people to prompt feelings of sympathy for Ken Lay, but the members of the Senate Commerce Committee, it turns out, are pretty darn special. When the disgraced former Enron CEO appeared before the committee this week and, as expected, took the Fifth Amendment, the 21 senators practically crawled over one another to pummel Lay–a man whom, not so long ago, most of them were crawling over one another to ask for campaign contributions.

[…]One might imagine that in the course of their interminable fulminations, at least one of Lay’s inquisitors would have acknowledged that he or she benefited from Enron’s largesse. But apparently such petty disclosures are beneath the dignity of U.S. senators.

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