Ah yes...I wondered when the Belushis would step in...

Dogpile on the Woodward...

From the New York Daily News-recently endorsed by Bill O'Reilly as a "media operation [that has] regularly helped distribute defamation and false information supplied by far left websites"...

You've heard the uproar over the famed Watergate sleuth's taking two years to reveal that he was leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Now the widow of John Belushi has recruited a gang of the late comic's friends to pay back Woodward for "Wired," his grim 1985 bio of her husband.

After the "SNL" player OD'd, Judy Belushi Pisano encouraged all of his pals to talk to Woodward, who, like John, had grown up in Wheaton, Ill.


She now tells us: "Woodward was the wrong guy [to write that book]. I was foolish."

Actually, I'm glad she admits that. In her own memoir, "Samurai Widow" she wrote of having invited Woodward to write the book without have read a single thing he'd written. She was going almost solely by his reputation as "the man who brought down Nixon."

The late Belushi's family and friends may have much to complain about in that book, but in a very real sense, they have only themselves to blame. That does not mean, however, that I am not anxious to read:

So she and Tanner Colby have assembled "Belushi: A Biography," a just-published collection of affectionate memories of John — and unaffectionate ones of Woodward.

Writer Mitch Glazer recalls that all Woodward wanted to hear about was Belushi's drug use. "Whenever I started telling him the good things about John, he would literally put down his pen and wait for me to finish," says Glazer.

Al Franken remembers seeing Woodward in the office of "SNL" producer Lorne Michaels. "I went over to [Woodward] and said, 'Well, you know, the only time I ever saw John snorting coke was with [Woodward's colleague] Carl Bernstein.' And that was the last I ever heard from him." (Franken assures us that he was just kidding.)

Woodward declined to comment on the charges. But Judy says, "I'm not angry anymore. I just felt it was something that needed to be put straight."

"Wired," though I think it's possible to read more sympathetically than Belushi's family and friends do, does focus too much on the dark side. "Samurai Widow," while compelling and satisfying on its own terms, was not an alternate biography but the story of one woman's bereavement and eventual return to happiness.

I hope this new book will be a more accurate picture of the man who, arguably, was the greatest natural talent ever to emerge from SNL.