They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this photo of disgraced former Clark County Commissioner Erin Kenny sure screams volumes. They could do a decade’s worth of DARE program classes, a month of Sunday school sermons and a year’s worth of scared straight videos and they’d still not be able to compete with the simple message that this picture sends: Doing evil makes you look really old.

Then again, this photo of Kenny also has a message: Sometimes, people do things that make them look really stupid. The Review-Journal has carted it out from time to time, and it always makes us chuckle. 

"I’m not here today to make any excuses because there are none," Kenny told U.S. District Court Judge Kent Dawson, according to the R-J’s story. "I’m here to see this through."

But, in that story and an excellent sidebar that summarized Kenny’s career, the R-J coverage made one thing patently clear: Kenny has never apologized to the constituents she betrayed with her bribe-taking, loyalty selling, and ambition that supplanted the public’s interest with her own interest. (Ironically, Kenny once testified that she immediately apologized to the FBI for her bad acts when agents confronted her.)

She may be going to jail, but wethinks she’s not at all sorry for what she’s done. And that’s got to account for some of the hatred that her name invokes around here.

Kenny’s excellent lawyer, Frank Cremen, argued that Kenny should get less than the 2-1/2 years that Dawson handed out on Wednesday. After Kenny was confronted by the FBI, she immediately confessed to her crimes and struck a plea agreement to testify against other corrupt officials and businessmen. That’s got to earn her something, he argued.

Sorry, counselor. She confessed only after she was caught. Had the FBI remained in the dark about her schemes, they could still be going on, only this time, from the rarefied air of the lieutenant governor’s office in Carson City, or beyond. (Hey, wait, isn’t the lieutenant governor under investigation right now anyway? Oh, the more things change…)

In the end, we think one R-J headline got it right: "Spirited Kenny offered promise/Colleagues say they thought she stood for something." Well, it turns out that’s true. Her energy, innate intelligence and incredible drive could have amounted to something. The only problem was, the only thing she really stood for was herself. And that combination, we Las Vegans have now learned so well, is deadly.

» The Review-Journal has pretty much owned the Kenny-in-court story in the news department, but the Las Vegas Sun had a couple good things to say as well, including an editorial lauding the verdict.

My colleague Jon Ralston put things in perspective on Sunday with a column looking back at Kenny’s career and lamenting her wasted potential. And another colleague, Jeff Simpson, issues a charge for businesses to avoid doing business with Kenny-tainted figures, like developer Jim Rhodes. (We’d agree with that, and even expand the list to include Triple 5 Nevada Development Corp., which Kenny claimed paid her for a vote on an abortive casino in Spring Valley. Where are those indictments, federal grand jury?)

» On the other hand, R-J columnist Jane Ann Morrison today wrote that she would have given Kenny less than the 2-1/2 years she received after pleading guilty to corruption charges. Why? Let’s let my former colleague explain:

"Personally, I’d have given Kenny a six-month break for confessing and not lying on the stand as [former Clark County Commissioners Mary] Kincaid Chauncey and [Dario] Herrera did. But I loathe liars," her column reads.

What? Kenny didn’t lie on the stand? You mean to say that she really does have memory loss as a result of vertigo, a diagnosis unsupported by medical science? She really can recall some details with amazing clarity, but not others? It wasn’t just defense lawyers like Dominic Gentile who disbelieved Kenny (he called her, appropriately, a "trollop" when it comes to credibility). The judge and the jurors thought she was full of it, too!

Maybe it all depends on what the definition of "lie" is?