‘Stay, ho! and let us hear Mike Gallagher’
“But yesterday the word of Kenneth Lay might have stood against the world;
now lies he there, and none so poor to do him reverence. “
Mike Gallagher gets his soliloquy on:
Maybe I’m mistaken. Perhaps your husband was as corrupt as people said he was. I just never believed it. I don’t think that a man who created a company like Enron would have been so cruel and uncaring as to intentionally hurt his employees, if for no other reason than his pride for his company would have stopped him. I believe in my heart that no one was sicker or sadder over the pensions and life savings lost by Enron employees than Kenneth Lay.
Friends, Mrs. Lay, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come not to bury Kenneth Lay, but to praise him.
The evil that men allegedly do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
Let it not be so with Kenneth Lay. The noble Media
Hath told you Kenneth Lay was ambitious:
If it were so, it was an admirable quality,
And grievously hath Kenneth Lay suffer’d for it.
Here, under leave of the Media and the rest –
For the Media is a treacherous woman;
So are they all, all treacherous women –
Come I to speak in Kenneth Lay’s defense.
While he was never my friend, he was a man of faith, self-made and likable:
But the Media says he was ambitious;
And the Media is a treacherous woman.
She hath demonized many wealthy people for sport
Whose philanthropy did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Kenneth Lay seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Kenneth Lay hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet the Media says he was ambitious;
And the Media is a treacherous woman.
You all did see that in Enron’s boardroom
He thrice presented Andy Fastow too much power,
Which he did thrice abuse: was this ambition?
Yet the Media says he was ambitious;
And, sure, she is a treacherous woman.
I speak not to disprove what the Media spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do presume.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Kenneth Lay,
And I must pause ’til it come back to me.
Methinks there is much meshugahnosity in his sayings…
If thou considers rightly of the matter
Kenny Boy has had great wrong.
Has he, masters? I fear there will a worse come in his place…
Et tu, Travis?
i was so moved by gallagher’s touching sympathy that i too wrote a poem:
Death most convenient
Better than a saw in cake.
Everyone’s seen “Fletch�.
oh, and this one:
There once was a man named Ken
Undone by chatty bagmen
A stand-in he whacked
With a fake heart attack
And fucked off to Brazil in the end.
He’s never heard of, I dunno, Wal*Mart? Mining accidents? Fed Ex’s extensive OSHA problems? Companies “hurt” their employees all the time. Minimum wage is deliberately hurting employees for the good of a company. So’s outsourcing. So’s ignoring safety issues. Is there some sort of exceptionalism here that says American companies in third world countries that insist employees have abortions or be fired don’t count? What about companies here that increase assembly line speed to where employees have to wear diapers because they don’t get bathroom breaks? How about an average of fifty five hundred dead of occupational accidents every year? How about laws making it easier for companies to dip into and leave underfunded pension plans?
Ken Lay was a thief. Mike Gallagher is an idiot.
I come not to bury Kenneth Lay, but to praise him.
For the record, the phrase is “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”
This was ironic. Antony’s clear goal was to praise Caesar. Now, the way that you have it, it means…uh…urrrgfh! It means that my brains are being turned into a Moebius loop.
why is it that the uber-criminals always manage to get out of paying their debts to society? they should seize his estate out of spite, although there’s a chance that since he didn’t get to appeal, the conviction could be eliminated. this is from wikipedia (sorry, i suck at html, so no link):
“Since Lay died prior to exhausting his appeals, his conviction will be considered abated under precedent in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Federal appellate court governing the district where Lay was indicted;[10] therefore the law views it as though he had never been indicted, tried and convicted.[11][12] Civil suits are expected to continue against Lay’s estate. However, according to one legal expert quoted, claimants may not seek punitive damages against a deceased defendant, only compensatory damages. [13]”
Gallagher an apologist for avarice? He was funnier with the watermelons.
Because as well all know, money = morality.
Jesus H. Christ starving on the street, Ken Lay wouldn’t have given a shit if Enron burnt to the ground with everyone inside. It’d have gotten rid of the evidence, at least. He was a crooked fucking crook, and the only thing that sucks about him being dead is that he can’t die some more.
Shakespeare couldn’t have done it better!
wait…
Come on, fellas. Dead is dead. It’s a classic case of “How can I miss you when you won’t go away”. I gotta figure that he lived a bad life, was rewarded for it, and now he’s paid the big price. Remember him how you will, but there’s really no point in kicking at the body. We all end up in the same place–wormfood. I dunno. It’s not about being remembered fondly, or accumulating a bunch of money, for that matter. It’s not even about karma, if you are one who wants to believe in some kind of cosmic justice. I’ll try to do the best for the people around me that I can, not because it pays well, or because I want people to canonize me after my death. Nope. It’s a personal choice–lie, cheat, steal, enrich yourself on the suffering of others, well, ultimately you sit in judgement on yourself. Earthly justice would have meant a prison cell, but I’m not going to sit here and think he somehow “beat the system” by dying. ‘Cause whatever else it might have been, it’s over now. On to skilling!!
mikey
Sargent D says:
(cue some sappy classical music that Kenny Boy probably liked)
“YOU’RE.
DEAD!!”
(cut sappy music)
I have kind of a weird question: Did anyone happen to catch Ann Coulter’s June 12 appearance on the Mike Gallagher radio show?
What a truly compassionate person Mike Gallagher is. And I’m sure he would have been just as compassionate if Lay had been a major contributor to Democrats, and had lent his private plane to John Kerry. In fact, I’ll bet if George Soros were to die tomorrow, nobody would be more upset than Mike Gallagher.
“I don’t think that a man who created a company like Enron would have been so cruel and uncaring as to intentionally hurt his employees, if for no other reason than his pride for his company would have stopped him. I believe in my heart that no one was sicker or sadder over the pensions and life savings lost by Enron employees than Kenneth Lay.”
???
What is it with these people? They’re like Pavlov’s dogs, only trained not to salivate at the sound of bells but to roll over on their backs and urinate submissively in the presence of big-shot CEOs. Does he not know that this company “earned” much of its profits through financial scams and manufactured power crises? Given how this company did business, is it really THE SLIGHTEST BIT hard to imagine that the guys who ran it cared about NOTHING but their own fortunes?
Oops, I forgot — first you have to have an imagination to do that.
anyone else think gallagher might be trying to move in on the widow?
Another fine one… Keep the classics coming, I’m certain each one paralyzes Doughy Pantload with horrific flashbacks of getting caught copying from his neighbor’s answers during grade school exams.
In honor of classics week on S,N!, here’s a nostalgic relink to my 2nd* all-time-fave Onion story: Bush Regales Dinner Guests With Impromptu Oratory On Virgil’s Minor Works.
(*after “Lewinsky subpoenaed to reblow Clinton on Senate floor”)
I think Gallagher’s right, Kenny-boy didn’t intentionally hurt his employees, he just didn’t give a shit.
Come on, fellas. Dead is dead. It’s a classic case of “How can I miss you when you won’t go away�. I gotta figure that he lived a bad life, was rewarded for it, and now he’s paid the big price.
Nope. He died. That happens to everyone.
An awful lot of people who worked all their lives and are going to be greeting people at Walmart until they die to keep themselves indoors have paid the big price for Ken Lay.
Nil nisi bonum only works if the dearly departed didn’t grease the chutes for the administration that’s gutting our country and they’re trying to pretend they never knew him.
Dropping dead in his palatial Aspen home was too good for this piece of shit.
Maybe Ken Lay has to be Wal*Hell greeter until the end of time.
William Shatner performed a rap version of that speech from Julius Caesar for the movie “Free Enterprise.” It’s the most appalling thing he’s ever done.
Ah, yes. I had to memorize the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” monologue in the eighth grade. Good times.
Oh wow, Mike Gallagher. I have a coworker who listens to his show every day. He went on and on about this column today. He even read the whole thing on the air. Then he followed that up with a ten minute rant about the badge he’s now required to wear, even though “the hallways are covered in pictures of [his] fat face,” so everyone knows who he is, and he’s sure *Chris Wallace* doesn’t have to wear a badge.
Anyway, it made me giddy to see someone give him the mocking he deserves.
Kenneth Lay was a saint!!1!
A true martyr for capitalism!!!one!
mike gallagher sucks