A statue of a large crawfish greets customers out by the patio.
Twenty miles away in Uniontown, three men had set up a roadside stove in front of a burned-out building where they served $2 bowls of boiled crawfish, a washed-out canopy shielding them from the hot sun.
In Lake Okeechobee, at the northern boundary of the Everglades, algae blooms had become so stifling that huge groups of crawfish and snails crawled out of the water in search of oxygen.
He added: "For 11 long years, Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, weedled out of any agreements he had made not to develop weapons of mass destruction.
"For 11 long years, Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction, agreements he's made to treat the people within his country with respect.
"For 11 long years, Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction, agreements he's made to treat the people within his country with respect," Mr. Bush said after the meeting with Congressional leaders.
The Crawfish Festival grew out of the town's centennial, in 1959, and everyone agrees that the first few festivals were joyous occasions — townspeople costumed in old-fashioned Acadian dress, everyone dancing the fais-dodo in the streets, jollity at the crawfish races in the afternoon and at the local dance hall at night.
"It almost looks like you could pop the meat out like a crawfish and eat it with melted butter," he mused.
ITC officials now argue that because Chez Sidney didn't officially back the unfair trading case back then, it shouldn't get a share of the $7.5 million in duties collected from Chinese producers and then doled out to American crawfish processors.
Or in its out-of-the-way crawfish farms, and its cockfights, and its gnarly French Catholicism.
