Ken Lay's holiday gift

Add Ken Lay to your list of things to be thankful for this holiday season. Remember how he put Houston on the corporate scandal map? How he dutifully sacrificed some of his homes and cars to show that he's just like you and me? And yesterday, Lay saved us from the horrors of a potentially Enron-free holiday season with a highly entertaining luncheon speech.

Lay quoted Winston Churchill, saying "Truth is the great rock" and in his case prosecutors have submerged it in "wave of terror."

Lay promised he'll testify and asked other Enron employees to join him in creating a "wave of truth."

"Enron employees really have only two choices. Either we stand up now — and prove that Enron was a real company, a substantial company, an honest company, a company that had a vision and values — or we will leave this horrific legacy shaped by others," he said.

Wave of terror? Wave of truth? Ken, this is super material. The TV movie is practically writing itself! We especially like how Lay is calling on Enron employees — the ones he screwed out of their jobs and retirement savings, remember — to help him erase "this horrific legacy shaped by others." By "others," of course, he means himself and his cronies.

Actually, Lay's speech wasn't much of a change from what he's been saying all along: He didn't know what nefarious things his underlings were up to, the prosecutors are out to get him, those silly traders lost confidence in a perfectly sound company. In short, the Enron collapse was everyone else's fault.

What also hasn't changed is the way the Enron folks play to the media. Houstonist would love to see the Enron execs vs. Sheila Jackson Lee in a sack race to a bank of cameras. As the Chronicle's Loren Steffy noted:

"We ended up in a vortex where nobody was speaking the truth, and everyone was speaking to the cameras," [Lay] said. "I think that's beginning to end."

Given the number of boom mikes dangling over Lay's head as he left the ballroom, given that there hadn't been so many TV cameras in one place in this town since the World Series, I think not.