As I pointed out before, the best legal venue to handle the aftermath of a business collapse is the civil court. When a business implodes, as Enron did, there is no way one can recover all that has been lost. However, the civil court proceedings at least present an orderly way of cleaning up the mess.

Keep in mind that the criminal convictions will not put a penny in the pockets of former Enron employees who lost money and their jobs when the company collapsed. Their cheering in the aftermath of the convictions is simple revenge: “We lost money, so someone must pay.”

In the past four years, we have seen the government criminalize business failures. Now, the Enron collapse did not come because Ken Lay and others saw the collapse as a way to get rich. Indeed, those men have lost nearly everything, too.

If the government really is concerned about creative accounting, perhaps the feds might want to look in the mirror. There is no more fraudulent activity on the face of the earth than the accounting methods of the U.S. Government. Thus, we have the irony of the U.S. attorney who represents the biggest accounting fraud in history accusing others of engaging in fraud.

This episode also shows us the depths to which “progressives” are plunging. The Air America blog had people openly calling for Lay to be raped in prison. My guess is that the Moveon.org site is equally as ugly, something I am not even interested in seeing.

But, then, “progressive” Democrats cheered on Janet Reno’s mass murder at Waco, so why should we expect them to be any better than Republicans? All I can say is that the wrong people are going to prison.