Richard Clarke is the greatest man who has ever strode this planet's surface. I know this because I have just read his book, "Against All Enemies."

What Clarke reveals in "Against All Enemies" is that - not to put too fine a point on it - he is a self-regarding buffoon. But his solipsistic silliness won't give pause to the Democrat-media desperation to rewrite recent history in an effort to delude voters that the 9/11 attacks were the fault of George W. Bush's inattention.

He is the man who took charge of America on 9/11 by "putting together a secure teleconference to manage the crisis," he writes on page 2.

A secure teleconference! Wow!

Neither Clarke nor the administration discerned al Qaeda's hand in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, though the evidence of financial support is plain now. Clarke believed Iran was behind the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, though we now know it to have been the work of al Qaeda. And he told Bill Clinton that the pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan blown up after the embassy bombings in 1998 was an al Qaeda workshop, which it wasn't.

And the Clinton administration didn't respond at all to the bombing of USS Cole in October 2000. This would seem to be the most glaring failure of all, since 17 American sailors died and more than 100 were wounded.

In the months after 9/11, the Bush administration refused - absolutely refused - to try to blame the attacks on the Clinton administration's failure of vision. The nation needed to be united in its determination and could not afford to surrender to finger-pointing.

Well, guess what? The Clinton administration's senior foreign-policy officials will be appearing this week before the 9/11 commission - to do to the Bush administration exactly what the Bush administration refused to do to them.