Transform xml without copying one element.

Hi:
I have the following xslt to transform an xml into another xml doc
such that the first template copies the current node and attributes
and the second one should not copy any variable elements, but this is
not working and the output is same as input.

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
  <xsl:copy>
     <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="variable"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>