State Dept. Guest in Chile Slams Bush As A Liar And Lawless

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Santiago Times

STATE DEPT GUEST IN CHILE SLAMS BUSH AS A LIAR AND LAWLESS

Author Jay Parini Condemns Bush’s War In Iraq

(Oct. 26, 2007) Although the United States State Department invited Jay Parini to visit Chile this week, the famous American author is not hiding his opposition to the Bush Iraq war when speaking to Chileans. He says that the Bush administration “has been the most lawless administration in American history.” He adds that “we’re living in a perilous time, and we have to speak out, and criticize.”

Parini, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, is best known for his biographies of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Robert Frost, though he has also published numerous historical novels and books of poetry, as well as several anthologies. His novel about Leo Tolstoy, The Last Station, is now being made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren.
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He says he has been an anti-war protester ever since he was in college in 1967 and marched against the Viet Nam war. In fact, he spent seven years in Scotland during that period of time because of his “extreme” opposition to the war. He is now a member of a group of poets who are actively campaigning against the Bush Iraq war. When President Bush’s wife invited him to the White House to read his poetry, he informed her that he would speak against the invasion of Iraq, and he was promptly “uninvited.”

Now he asks this hypothetical question: “Can you imagine if Bush had said to the American people I’m about to invade Iraq, we’re going to lose 4,000 American soldiers at a minimum, we’re going to wound 29,000 very, very badly, it’s going to cost us a trillion dollars, plus all the money we’re going to be spending on decades of health care for the wounded soldiers, it’s going to turn the Middle East against us in such a way that it will probably take us three decades to recover from it, oh yes, on top of which there are no weapons of mass destruction, can you imagine, then I think he would have been ridden out of town on a rail. He could only get away with this by lying.”


Read more: http://www.tcgnews.com/santiagotimes/index.php?nav=story&story_id=15052&topic_id=15

[aquart]

1. Is he now on the No Fly list?