to call President Bush an idiot. As Catholic Light‘s token Canadian, allow me to interpret these events for our readers. To begin, I really wouldn’t get too worked up about either comment.
Beginning with Crouton’s aide, Crouton has never really been taken seriously by Canadians outside of the Liberal Party. Rather, most Canadians kept re-electing Crouton with the understanding that Paul Martin would be the Finance Minister, and would make most of the Government’s major decisions. It is kinda Bush(Sr.)-Quayle in reverse, and it worked for the longest time despite Crouton being a little tin dictator. Basically, Crouton got to pretend he was Prime Minister, and Canadians rested easy knowing that Paul Martin was making all the decisions normally made by the Prime Minister. This worked for about ten years as behind the scenes, Martin worked to wrestle control of the party from Crouton, and Crouton worked to wrestle control of the government and of the respect of average Canadians from Martin. Every once in a while the skirmishes would surface in the media, however, for the most part they kept a lid on it.
Sometime during the last year, things came to a halt when Crouton again attempted to block Martin from consolidating his growing power within the party. In response to this, Martin more or less attempted a party coup and Crouton responded by going into siege mode. A “He quit” “No, I was fired” exchange occured in the media between the two men, and within days both sides were calling for a dogfight. Most Canadians sided with Martin and Crouton’s popularity dropped quite dramatically. Sensing this, most of the party faithful have changed sides and thrown their support behind Martin. In order to maintain power and survive a leadership review that was destined to fire him, Crouton agreed to step down as Prime Minister in about fourteen months. He is now publicly what he has always been privately, namely, a lame duck Prime Minister. Among Canadians, the majority of whom think Crouton is a goof, nothing could have raised President Bush’s popularity more than to be called a moron by Crouton.