Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House

Barbara Olson

Regnery

Barbara Olson, author of The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House (Regnery), died aboard Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, there­fore, she does not have to account for the non­sense in this slim vol­ume, in which fac­tual evi­dence lies a lot thin­ner on the ground than the unex­plained debris from 9 – 11. Compared to the data on George W. Bush after he was in office for just two years — enough to put him, his fam­ily and his entourage away for life — this sad attempt to “expose” the Clinton admin­is­tra­tion as a failed social­ist coup (yes, folks, that’s the the­sis of this book) should be sub­ti­tled Much Ado About Very Little. A much more intrigu­ing book could be writ­ten about Barbara Olson. Had she not made those famous airline-seat phone calls to her hus­band, there would have been no liv­ing wit­nesses to tell the world about the box-cutter-wielding Middle Eastern ter­ror­ists. Then again, it has since been pointed out that Olson could not have made those calls because one can­not tele­phone col­lect from an American Airlines plane. Is a pic­ture form­ing here of an ambi­tious, highly placed Washington lawyer, White House com­mit­tee mem­ber and right-wing socialite and TV gos­sip mon­ger, who will go down in his­tory as one of the heroes of September 11? If this book is her mon­u­ment, it’s a taste­less, tacky one.