Expectorating

By Zamboni

The Worst Person Who's Ever Lived was in Montreal on Thursday.

See, some former residents of the White House spend their post-Presidencies curing guinea worm disease and river blindness. Others are like George W. Bush. He's traveling Canada right now, on a pre-publication tour to promote the book he's allegedly writing — speaking to friendly business groups for $150,000 a pop. We cats find this obscene.

But wait, there's hope. Well before the Metropolitan Montreal's Board of Trade luncheon began, hundreds of protesters turned out at the Hotel Queen Elizabeth to honk horns, burn Bush in effigy and, you guessed it, throw shoes. And it's extremely amusing that during his speech, Bush made a thrilling Freudian slip when he listed a few of his "regrets" from his term in office. One of them, he said, was standing in front of that banner on the aircraft carrier — the one that said "Mission Impossible"!

Finally, there was the French-language newspaper glimpsed over the shoulder of a fellow subway passenger. It wasn't until later, when we checked our French dictionary, that we realized that a headline we'd read declared, "Everyone Spits at Bush."

Okay, we cats have a question. Our current President wins the Nobel Peace Prize. His predecessor is an object of loathing and disgust.

And the Nobel Peace Prize is bad how?

(PHOTO: John Mahoney, The Montreal Gazette)