Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Apr. 20, 2004

In six months a lot can happen, things that can help voters decide who they'll choose to lead the nation on the first Tuesday of November. The health of the economy, what's happening in Iraq and the war on terrorism, the price of gasoline, mortgage interest rates - all kinds of stuff that can have an impact on voters' opinions of just who they want running the country for the next four years.

Given all that uncertainty, what does it matter who's leading in the polls half a year away from the election? Aside from the media and nervous campaign staffs, who the heck cares who's leading at this point?

It's all a lot of hooey.

Also occupying the media is something known popularly as the 9/11 Commission, today's version of the public hangings of bygone days - gruesome to behold, but nonetheless a spectacle not to be missed. Urged on by the shrill voices of a gaggle of partisan 9/11 widows who call themselves the "Jersey Girls" and see no shame in exploiting the tragic deaths of their husbands on behalf of their need to bash Bush, this misbegotten panel of political has-beens has managed to transform the tragedy of 9/11 into a sick political joke.

Anybody who believes that this commission was born out of anything but Democrat and media desire to pin the blame for 9/11 on the Bush administration and deflect it from the Clintonoids, who had eight painfully long years to deal with the likes of Osama bin-Laden and didn't, is badly mistaken.

All you have to do to understand this is to look at the partisan hacks the Democrats named to a Commission charged with the responsibility to render sober judgment on the causes of the tragedy. Richard Ben-Veniste, a sleazy Washington lawyer? A has-been member of Congress? Where did they find these people?

And where did they find Jamie Gorelick who one of the Jersey Girls, an up-to-date version of the Dixie Chicks, recently assured a TV audience had the goods on Bush? (That was before we learned that John Ashcroft had the goods on Jamie Gorelick.)

Thanks to the much maligned attorney general, it's been shown that if anyone bore much of the blame for the failure to prevent 9/11 it was John Kerry's widely rumored pick to be his attorney general, the aforementioned Gorelick.

Having her on the Commission instead of as a witness before it is a shining example of black humor - sort of like having John Wilkes Booth on a panel investigating Lincoln's assassination or Lee Harvey Oswald, had he been available, on the Warren Commission.

If you are looking for somebody to blame for something, blame the Bush administration for wimpishly caving in to Democrat and media demands to establish the commission which they knew from the outset was meant to plunge the 9/11 dagger into the President's breast. The fact of the matter is that given the circumstances in place at the time, nothing could have prevented the hijackers from carrying out their deadly mission.

What a lot of hooey.

Mr. Bob Woodward, the Washington Post's resident celebrity reporter, has written a book based on slews of interviews with White House insiders, who he fails to identify. The book has been greeted with shouts of huzzahs from his media comrades and the likes of Mr. John Kerry, who in case you didn't know it served in Vietnam where he boasts of having committed heinous war crimes during his heroic four months in combat.

Without having read a word of the book, his legion of slavish admirers rushed into print with all sorts of breathless assurances that Woodward has the White House insiders on the record, but without attribution of course, revealing presidential skullduggery in planning for the Iraq war.

Now Woodward - for reasons that escape me unless its a strange modification of the Stockholm syndrome, where one becomes enamored of his enemy - has the key to the inner sancta of the White House where he is free to wander about picking up bits and pieces of backstairs gossip from the mansion's (unnamed) retainers.

From these bits and pieces which he skillfully pieces together, Woodward knits a patchwork quilt which allegedly reveals what has gone on underneath its covers.

As I said, few who have initially commented on the book had bothered to read it. But the President's people have read it. And it appears they actually like it. So much so that they are plugging the book on their White House website.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, who Woodward's Washington Post and the New York Times have long struggled mightily to portray through interviews with anonymous insiders as being badly out of step with his boss, the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense, admits he spoke to Woodward.

But he denies Woodward's assertions that he was kept in the dark about the Presidents plans to whack Iraq.

For at least a week, even before CBS 60 Minutes peddled the book which is owned by CBS parent company Viacom, the Woodward book has crowded everything except the latest casualty figures from Iraq and the last minute poll results off the front pages.

Does anybody stop to consider that this is just a book? A book by a celebrity reporter who preens himself as being not merely among the mighty, but one of them? That most of the stories engendered by the book have been written by journalists who have at best scanned the work for its juicy parts? Are they stirring raging tempests in teapots?

What a lot of hooey.

Senator Kerry, who by the way served in Vietnam, wants the administration to go groveling to the U.N. to beg this institution for all that is wise and good to come bail us out in Iraq.

The media joins in the chorus along with countless other liberals who despise the very idea of the U.S. being a sovereign nation instead of a satrap of the U.N.

While all this business about the crying need to have this gang of miscreants on the East River lend us their wisdom and grant us the blessing of having them save us from ourselves in Iraq, the dirty little secret of U.N. complicity in it's own multi-billion dollar oil for food scam is emerging. It is revealed that Saddam was given billions to enrich himself, build his palaces and bribe foreign leaders to support him - billions meant to provide food and medicine for his suffering people.

The scandal, long covered up by Kofi Annan and his minions, is slowly being brought to light, not by the U.N., but by outsiders. It is just another chapter in a long sordid story of U.N. corruption and mismanagement of international affairs.

This is the institution that John Kerry and his friends want to take over from us in Iraq, where they will have another crack at all those petroleum dollars. Are they kidding? They might just as well send NOW or NARAL - after all, it would eliminate the U.N. as the middle man in their drive to make abortion America's leading export. They might not bring peace to Iraq - but there would be a lot more dead babies.

Send the U.N. to Iraq? What a lot of hooey.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He can be reached at phil@newsmax.com.