Bush Critic Booed at Commencement

Left-wing literary darling E.L. Doctorow was nearly booed off the stage at Long Island's Hofstra University yesterday when the commencement address he'd been invited to give turned into an anti-Bush tirade that excoriated the president as a liar.

The celebrated author spent virtually all of his 20-minute address lambasting Bush as "a storyteller," according to Newsday, saying, "sadly they are not good stories this president tells."

"They are not good stories because they are not true," Doctorow contended, in a line that prompted the first boos.

As Doctorow continued, the booing grew so loud at one point that Hofstra President Stuart Rabinowitz interrupted him in a bid to calm the crowd of relatives of graduating seniors, many of whom were livid at the attempt to politicize the ceremony.

"To ruin my daughter's graduation with politics is pathetic," retired New York Police Department captain Bill Schmidt told Newsday.

"If this would have happened in Florida, we would have taken him out" of the stadium, complained Frank Mallafre, who traveled from Miami for his granddaughter's graduation.

Even some students called Doctorow's speech inappropriate.

"He's a bit like Michael Moore," graduating senior Peter Hulse told the paper.

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