From the "Never-ending quest to show that George W. Bush is the most inarticulate person to ever gargle in the English language" File.

Heres a Washington Post article entitled, "Crawfishing from a Unique Vernacular." The article is a meandering stewpot. The purpose of its disjointed paragraphs is really not susceptible to logical parsing, albeit it does seem commited to creating a tone that President Bush is really inarticulate, even though he's not. For example, the article initially spends a paragraph "quoting" Bush's observation that if people are left their own money, they will demand "gooder services." A reader's initial reaction would probably be to groan at Bush's inability to comprehend points of English usage that the average second-grader has mastered. But the article then points out that "gooder service" is actually a transcription error and that Bush had said "good or service."

The reader then should ask something like "does the author of this article have any intent to ever connect to the alleged topic of the article?" How is a transcription error an example of anyon'e "vernacular?" Sure, quoting the unscripted speech of conservative polticians is always good for a cheap thrill, but any attorney knows that transcription errors are a dime a dozen and are usually the fault of the transcriber, not the speaker. [Also, transcription errors are frequently unintentionally amusing. I remember asking about "alzheimer's disease" in a deposition, only to have my question transcribed as asking about "old timer's disease," which almost works. I guess that is an example of a "Central California vernacular."]

Anyhow, the article then observes that "the phrase, which Bush uses, regularly, has posed some difficulty for him." So, maybe it really is Bush's fault after all.

Then, the article moves into the "they hate things, we love things" quote that Eugene Volokh has debunked by the simple expedient of quoting the phrase in context. [Ah, context, what a concept.]

The article than moves on to the great "crawfish" controversy of 2002, which the press presumably lept onto to show Bush's mangling of language. The problem is that the word "crawfish" actually is recognized by dictionaries, and connotes the sense of a hasty and undignified backtracking from a previously intransigent position accompanied by bluster and bluffing. For example, the common English phrase "Well, maybe Bill Clinton did commit perjury, but so what? He was defending the Constitution, and he was being hectored by mean-spirited religious hypocrites" would be an example of crawfishing. Although, the author of this article may not have heard of this use of the word "crawfish" in J-school, I knew it, and I have never lived anywhere near the deep South.

The article neatly seques from the only thing near the topic of "vernacular" usages to accuse Bush of "crawfishing:"

Bush has also found a clever way of dismissing administration leaks. Rather than confirm or deny the leaks, Bush crawfishes: He belittles the leaker's rank in the government. Asked about finger-pointing between the FBI and the CIA this spring, Bush dismissed it as "the level-three staffers trying to protect their hide." Asked about an attack on Iraq at a July 8 press conference, Bush scoffed at "somebody down there at level five flexing some know-how muscle." He did not explain why this leaker was two levels below the other.

What the heck does this paragraph have to do with the initial premise of the article. The initial premise appeared to be that Bush misused the language by his resort to some unique regional "vernacular" usage, although apparently he's not using vernacular English, he's simply the victim of garden-variety transcription errors. It then moved on to interesting regional lexical usages which had been previously unknown to the Post, but which, in fact, would have been known to anyone who read material broader than the New Yorker or George.
Apparently, not content to violate only the generally accepted rules of essay writing - define a topic and stick with the topic, the article elects to lapse into a state of existential logical fugue by first defining "crawfish," and then misusing the recently defined word in the next paragraph. Nothing in the relevant comments about leaks constitutes "backtracking." Bush is "poisoning the well," but really how does that subtle rhetorical technique have anything to do with Bush's employment of an odd regional "vernacular?"

The article ultimately leaves gives up the ghost with respect to every reconnecting with its topic with this concluding paragraph:

An agitated Vice President Cheney, in a tête-à-tête with NBC's Tim Russert on Sunday, said it was "reprehensible" that people would think the administration had "saved" its ammunition on Iraq to bring it out now, 60 days before an election. "So the suggestion that somehow, you know, we husbanded this and we waited is just not true," Cheney said.

Now where would people get such a cockamamie idea? Well, maybe from White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and Bush political adviser Karl Rove, who made the case to the New York Times's Elisabeth Bumiller last week that they pretty much did what Cheney said they didn't do -- waited patiently and deliberately to launch a long-planned rollout. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," Card said. Added Rove: "The thought was that in August the president is sort of on vacation."

Again, what does this have to do with Bush's vernacular usage of the English language? Where is the Bushism in this passage dealing with Cheney's appearance on Sunday morning news shows.

And, finally, exhausted by following that last capricious leap from topic to topic, the article ends.