The Volokh Conspiracy

Without any context, I think this comes out grammatically inarticulate. There are dangling prepositions, and awkward sentence structure. And I have no idea what the last sentence is trying to say, or how it relates to the rest of the paragraph. What does a "door" have to do with anything?

The first "sentence" reads a little awkwardly, but I'm not surprised by that, extemporaneous speech usually does. H

aving not seen the desk in question, I don't get the bit about the door, exactly. I'm gathering that there's some photo of or well-known White House story about JFK crawling through it somewhere, but I certainly don't know what's going on without at least a picture of the desk.

I guess the joke is that (without context) it makes no sense. Stuff like this: "Is nine other presidents used it"; "That was given to us by Queen Victoria [US?]"; FDR "put the door in [the desk?]." "Kennedy put his head out the door [whatever that means]."

I suppose the point is that Bush appears, well, kind of retarded with this quote. Of course it's unfair because he appears to have said this stuff whileshowing a reporter around the Oval Office and pointing items. But it's okay to be unfair to the President if it makes him seem like a monkey, right?

I don't really see what point is being made either. Without any context it is somewhat difficult to understand how President Bush jumped from point to point, but this is casual conversation, not prose. I suppose it makes him seem like a scatterbrain, but that is probably because we don't have any context.

It is utterly baffling -- appears to be random sentences strung together: from the desk, to some door, with some random remark about JFK looking out the door.

My other reaction is that President Bush has paid attention to the provenance of his desk, and is correct that Queen Victoria was around in the 1870s. So much for the theory that President Bush knows nothing about history.

Other than grammatically the sentences don't make sense in print, like they might if it was a full oral conversation -- where you combine sentences and add pile phrases on top of each other and no problem, it'd be hard to diagram in print, but easy enough to follow the gist in conversation...

I sense this material was chosen for the funny sexual undertones. Queen Victoria ... Kennedy sticking his "head" out ... We live in coarse times, and this is a common lowest denominator appeal to sexual immaturity in a heh-heh way. Maybe Slate's going for the 18-25 demographic, and the wannabe's

I don't know what is funny about this quote, but the man does speak as if he is taking ESL courses.

I note some poor grammar, particularly in the first sentence. I guess perfection is always required, even when giving tours. I haven given tours, and unless scripted, it sometimes becomes ackward trying to add in trivial information about what is being shown.

I got the issue about the door. As for JFK, I recall something about him crawling underneath a desk for some photo shoot. If these are German journalist, they might recall that as well, and thus have something to recall the history of the desk.

Again, the only issue I find in the quote is poor grammar. Otherwise, writing about journalist getting a personalized tour of the White House from the President is fairly boring.

It's inarticulate. Nobody ever suspected Bush of having sharpened his public speaking style in something like the Oxford Union.

It's inconsequential.

I infer from this and other posts that you're on a crusade against Slate's collection of Bush hadiths. Slate is silly. Not worth your time.

I have no idea what is supposed to be funny about it. Frankly, it's practically incoherent. Was that the point?

Is it that he should have said JFK Jr.? I think he's talking about that famous picture of JFK Jr. sticking his head out of that door at the bottom of the desk as his father worked behind it. I guess if you never saw a picture of the desk, it is unclear what he’s talking about.

The royal "us." The other quotes from this interview have been much funnier to me, though.

Why do you assume Slate is trying to make a specific point with the Bushisms? Were people who made fun of Bush the Elder (who mangled speech at times worse than his son) making a point about how stupid that Bush was? Mocking the speech of the powerful does not strike me as unusual or suspicious activity requiring explanation.

Well, my first reaction is distaste for whoever is quoted...GWB, I assume, though that's not a given. Such incoherence indicates mental laziness, or perhaps a mental defect.

I think Bush is referring to JFK Jr., not the assassinated President:

As written, it appears to be incoherent and nonsensical. I assume that was the author's point.

It only makes sense if you know the history of the "Resolute" Desk:

http://www.answers.com/topic/resolute-desk

Otherwise, I have no insight into why the quote was selected. It strikes me as a strange quote to take out of context.

The "Bushism" only seems odd or funny out of context, that is, not knowing what's being spoken about.

I'm old enough to remember exactly what the President was referring to - it's a large desk with a "door" or movable partition in what would normally be called the "privacy panel" of the desk.

The only "funny" thing about the post is that the President probably meant to say "John-John Kennedy" or "JFK Jr." I can picture the photo from a 1963 edition of "Look" magazine - 2-year-old John-John, with a quizzical look on his face, poking his head out from under the desk - JFK himself was sitting at the desk, going through some papers - maybe he was aware of what John-John was doing-he had a little smile on his face.

Let's see, I guess that first sentence is mangled, but pretty much like how anyone would speak on the fly. The "door" thing didn't make sense to me until I figured it was a door in the desk. it's not funny, but a bit stumbling I guess. Not noteworthy though.

President Bush speaks like the rest of us and has more knowledge of history than some of the history professors at the school where I occassionally teach; one of whom once wrote an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe based entirely on his misapprehension that Samuel Adams played a major role in writing the Declaration of Independence. Also, it seems probable that this post has raised by some non-negligible amount the average IQ of those making hits on Slate, however brief the effect may be.

The first sentence seems to me to be a case of the speaker approaching the end of the sentence without knowing quite how to finish it. That's quite common, as other posters have noted. There's nothing remarkable about the second. The third lacks some context. I think that what the President was saying is that FDR located the door to the office in such a manner that those entering would not see his wheelchair. The context was probably there when the President was speaking, however.

The fourth sentence represents an abrupt transition, and includes a pronoun ("his") without a clear antecedent. Was it FDR's head that JFK put out the door, or his own (or perhaps somebody else's)? If JFK was simply putting his head out the door, was he greeting people? Trying to keep them from entering the office? Or was it JFK, Jr., in the well-known photograph?

I really don't know what point the author of the piece was trying to make. The only person I know who, in normal conversation, uses impeccable grammar is William F. Buckley.

I don't know what kind of "casual conversations" other people have, or what kinds of tours they give, but I can't remember anyone ever saying anything as incoherent as "Finally, the desk, where we'll have our picture taken in front of -- is nine other presidents used it," and it certainly doesn't happen on a regular basis. (Maybe it does, but my brain just screens it out into something coherent? I read a fair amount of transcripts, though, and stuff that incoherent is quite rare.)

I'm guessing the comments about the door, however, would be clarified quite a bit by context (or by an image). I assume the door is something built into the bottom of the desk, perhaps, to obscure the legs of the person sitting behind it; maybe Kennedy crawled out through it famously? That just seems like silly trivia and hardly a sign of stupidity (except to the extent that it may indicate an insensitive assumption that the other person knows what you're talking about, but that's a stretch).

I don't know why they didn't cut the quote after the first sentence.

The part about the door is insufficiently descriptive to convey much without the associated visual of (I guess) the desk. Of course, presumably Bush did have a handy visual aide nearby at the time.

What appears to be a possible use of the Soverign Royal "We/Us" seems odd, but that may not have been the intent, and might even be technically correct under the circumstances; ask a protocol expert.

Other than that... it's not an overly articulate quote, but neither is it spectacularly bad, either. I often babble similarly in person (I'm much more articulate in writing). I suspect it's the equivalent of a "slow news day" piece; they didn't have anything better to run in the slot.

Well clearly a lot of the agove comments have pointed out a lot of the things wrong with the quote (piss poor grammar, John Kennedy sticking his head instead of JFK, Jr., etc.) But I also want to add that even if we ignore the 1870s bit, there have been 12 presidents from FDR to the present, not nine. Maybe only nine of have used it...moral of the story is, an intern could have explained the history of that desk more coherently.

I recalled the story about the door on the desk and Roosevelt, but I wasn't sure about the comment about John Kennedy and why he would have his head out the door. I thought maybe he had put a carving of some sort of himself "on" the door and that the president had been misquoted.

I didn't think there was anything funny or otherwise exceptional about this paragraph. Maybe a little inarticulate because he stops and restarts after the word "is" but that is a perfectly normal speech pattern. We all do it. This "Bushism" nonsense stems from a visceral hatred of the president. I have a hard time watching him deliver a speech, but in a 1-on-1 setting like this interview he is very effective.

Apologies for any repetition, as I have not read any of the other comments, but the funniest part for me is the outright incoherence of the first sentence. "Finally, the desk, where we'll have our picture taken in front of -- is nine other presidents used it."

I'm 21, and if one of my friends said a sentence like this, I'd assume he was drunk. Even if he was, I'd still probably make fun of him for saying it. Weisberg (and I) simply want to hold the leader of the free world to at least the same standard as an intoxicated college student.

As for the rest of it, it sounds a bit disjointed, but I'm willing to assume he was pointing at different things as he spoke or that other nonverbal cues were important. Mainly I take issue with the first sentence.

Now clicking through the link above and seeing the picture, everything makes sense. The only problem with the quote is that Bush did did not make it clear that he was referring to the famous photo of John Kennedy. However, if you understood he was referring to the photo, it would NOT be necessary to use "John F. Kennedy, Jr." instead of "John Kennedy", since that would be clear.

without context, hard to follow. It comes off as inarticulate, but assuming he is giving some instruction or commentary on the furniture, I have no clue why this would rate as a "bushism"

Yes, I thought it was funny. There was a little nonsense at the beginning, with the “is” rendering the first sentence incomprehensible. The part that made me laugh out loud, however, was “John Kennedy put his head out the door.” Now, I presume that Bush is talking about the famous photo of JFK, Jr. playing under the desk while his father worked. But for an instant, I had an image of President Kennedy sticking his head through the door, and I laughed.

I generally agree with you about the uselessness and sometimes unfairness of the Bushisms, but I enjoyed this one.

It's not really funny other than the awkward prepositional phrase. I get what he was saying — the desk had a door-like panel put on the opening to hide FDR's wheelchair, and Kennedy stuck his head out that opening in a photo.

One other point I'd make is that I don't find the first sentence incoherent at all. It seems to me that it is actually two sentences, the first of which was unfinished, that were incorrectly run together by the transcriber. I assumed that he actually said: "Finally, the desk, where we'll have our picture taken in front of is...[pause - begin new sentence] Nine other presidents used it." He didn't finish the first sentence because he wanted to state the thought in another manner, which seems to me to be completely normal.

I agree with the above in that it is strange quote (nonsense) and seems out of context (if trying to figure out what it meant you would expect exogenous information to exist and be helpful) as much of our everyday speech would be if recorded. It is different from other out of context lines in that it is apparent that it is out of context, and thus not as misleading as some other quotes, but still doesn't make sense.

"What do I think is funny, ridiculous, inarticulate, telling, or otherwise noteworthy about it?"
It's an illustration of Bush's poor speaking skills. The first two sentences in the quotation are each grammatically troublesome. The second two sentences are disjointed without contextual explanation, but might be clearer if we could see the 'door'.

"What point do I think the author of the column was trying to make with it?"
Bush is not very well spoken.

P.S. Besides FDR, one other president modified the Resolute Desk. Which one, and why?

Reagan -- he had it raised because of his height.

The "us" thing seems like a weird one to knock him on. Clearly "us" refers to "us Americans" and is a shorthand used all the time in conversation.

I just think it's confusing because I don't know what the desk looks like. I don't can't quite picture the desk with a "door" or how someone might put his head out of it. I don't think that makes Bush sound stupid; I just think it is something that won't make sense unless you see the desk.

Slightly inarticulate, though something I (or anyone else) could easily say while speaking off the cuff. Slate (as usual) disingenuously withholds the context, making the JFK remark seem abrupt and out of place.

Eddie, before you go off blasting someone else's use of language, learn how to spell "non sequitur."

It sounds like a child recounting what he learned on a tour of the White House for class "show-and-tell." It's a jumble of facts smashed together with little regard for grammar or, more importantly, narrative coherence. I can't see how this would help the German reporter learn much about the desk. Then again, I suspect the reporter wasn't there to learn about the desk anyway.

By the way, I don't think Bush's awkward speech is a big deal. On the other hand, I don't see why Slate's reprinting these odd and often funny locutions is a big deal either, as it appears to be on VC.

The nine presidents did stand out as weird (I assumed that maybe it was used only irregularly, though), and the Wikipedia article confirms that it was used by 22, not 9, presidents, which means Bush was way off. Not really much of a knock, except that it's kind of obnoxious when people drop factoids to seem knowledgeable when in fact they're spreading misinformation. :)

(By the way -- I also think it's pretty silly to credit Bush with some preternatural intelligence for knowing that the desk came in the 1870's from Victoria and that it was modified by FDR and famously photographed with JFK and son. It's the desk he uses every day and it's the kind of trivia one remembers.)

Now that I know the story in question, I actually find the quote mildly (very mildly) amusing, just because it does make it sound like the President rather than his son was featured in the famous pose.

Incidentally, I recall the Bushisms being a lot more amusing way back in the day. My impression, at least, is that early on there was a fairly steady diet of pretty funny malapropisms and verbal gaffes, and I took it at the time as something pretty lighthearted. I stopped reading them long ago, however, and I agree that these recent examples seem pretty banal and mostly unfunny.

Having read the comments and followed the links to the photo and to the picture of John-John (I was born in 1962 and was never a Kennedy-phile, but I recall seeing photos of Pres. Kennedy allowing John-John to play within the office) the transcript makes perfect sense. The "is" through me, but as an incomplete sentence that bit makes sense. And while there have been 12 presidents, Armen, Wikipedia notes that Johnson, Nixon and Ford did not use it, 12 minus 9 equals 3.
I'm still not sure about the royal "we", but to whom exactly was the Resolute Desk given? The Presidents of the US? The people? The country? The White House? Does the current occupant of the White House conventionally speak about the collective Presidents when giving tours? How well does the German reporter speak English?

The first sentence is obviously missing part of the thought and the part about John Kennedy putting his head through sounds wrong if you don't know it was Jr. So to the ill-informed perfectionist, it sounds dumb.

Of course, the first sentence is inarticulate, owing to the "is", but that shouldn't be a big deal considering the conversational nature. Personally, I think the transcriber erred in keeping "I think it was" as a part of the QV sentence but I'd have to listen to Bush speak. That doesn't matter anyway — it's a conversation and he's showing someone around the office.

It's the last sentence, about Kennedy, which I think Slate thought was funny but either had no clue as what "door" Bush was trying to describe or decided to hide it. Because its a show and tell for Diekmann, I suspect Bush had moved on and was showing him pictures relating to FDR and Kennedy.

As for what Slate's point is, that's pretty apparent: Mock Bush.

I don't understand why this is funny.

JFK, Sr. was "Jack", and JFK, Jr., went by "John". The later apparently rarely used his full name, just going by what the President called him, "John Kennedy". President Bush is unlikely to have met "Jack" Kennedy, or if he did, it was when he was a teenager. Jack was a contemporary of George Bush (41) not his son, George Bush (43). On the other hand, the President is highly likely to have met and known the younger, "John" Kennedy.

Combining the Resolution Desk history given above and the photographs of John Kennedy looking out from under the desk as his father, Jack Kennedy worked, the entire conversation translates into an accurate verbal description of the President's desk.

Seems incoherrent to me, and I guess that's the author's point.

In the course of verbal communication, though, nearly everyone says things that don't translate well to print. For that reason, I don't generally find Bushisms especially funny or noteworthy.

It is a bit inarticulate. It makes it appear for instance that President John Kennedy stuck his head out the door and not his two or three year old son. Is this quote accurate? I have no idea. It is well known that Bush is not the most well spoken guy in the world. Even his defenders cop to that. Do I think that it reveals anything new we didn't know. No it doesn't. They are trying to do a Dan Quale, or Jerry Ford on Bush-- a guy who is a goof who some how ended up in a position of great power despite his stupidity.

I did just as instructed, didn't read any context nor any comments. Here's my take of how Bush probably looked and sounded during the tour:

"Finally, the desk...(Bush gestures toward table).. where we'll have our picture taken? -- nine other presidents used it. This was given to us by Queen Victoria in the 1870s; (Bush's expression changing to minor puzzlement) ... I think it was. (Turning and pointing to door.) President Roosevelt put the door in so people would not know he was in a wheelchair. (Chuckle) And see that door. (Gestures towards a door.) John Kennedy put his head out the door." -- Showing German newspaper reporter Kai Diekmann the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., May 5, 2006

Note: My changes to the text include: I removed an "in front of" and an "is". I changed a comma into a semicolon to fix the sentence fragment, but that would be correcting the author or transcriptionists rendition of the spoken word.

Presumably, the author wants us to notice that Bush, when giving impromptu tours, sometimes misplaces a few words.

Conversational speech often sounds clueless, particularly when gestures are removed.

I think the focus was on saying only nine presidents had used the desk. I think the rest of the quote is interesting in that it shows Bush should have known the number was higher than nine (given he knew Queen Victoria gave it and that FDR had used it and made changes).

What's noteworthy:
(1) Colloquial misuse of "where" in first sentence; like many such, it's jarring in print.
(2) Last few words of first sentence appear as a more serious distortion of grammar: "is nine other presidents used it." This is clearly a transcription error, though; the dash belongs after "is".
(3) "I think it was" in second sentence could be read to imply personal recollection, as if Bush thought he had been there to receive the gift and was trying to remember the occasion.
(4) "John Kennedy put his head out the door." A reader who hasn't picked up on the implication in Bush's previous sentence, that the "door" in the desk is at knee height, would be puzzled why he would say this without adding some context, such as "--during the Cuban missile crisis." Even so, when it's clear there must have been some incident or photo opportunity when Kennedy crouched under the desk as a joke, Bush's statement would have been clearer if he had added "--one time" or something.

What point was the author of the column trying to make with it? No special point beyond the premise of the column itself, which is that it's not hard to find Bush saying stupid things. In fact, however, as your readers have seen many times, the columnist often finds himself scraping the bottom of the barrel--adducing a quote that only someone expecting stupidity can read as stupid. This still pleases one part of the audience, or the exercise would not continue. It must still be one of the most thankless jobs in all of journalism.

(Posted without having read any of the prior comments)

The thing that strikes me most about this passage is the seeming inarticulousness of it. It is jumpy, in parts ungrammatical, and unclear, at least without further context. (And I don't expect that further context would fix the jumpiness or ungrammaticality.) As it stands, I really can't find much reason for the statement "John Kennedy put his head out the door." I'm generally centrist and apolitical, so I'm not (inherently) either a supporter or a basher of either Republicans or Democrats -- I try to examine each person on his own merits (or lack thereof), unfettered by outside baggage. That said, unless context really helps here, this does not sound like the thought process I would want coming from my President, although I recognize this was extemporaneous and our spoken paragraphs can't all be gems.

Now, *that* said, this does not strike me as something worthy of a "Bushism of the Day." In my opinion, those should be reserved for statements that either make no literal sense, strange coinages, scary power grabs, saying the opposite of what was meant, or times that really make one wonder if a gear is missing. This selection, while somewhat inarticulate, does not by my measure rise, or sink, to that level. (Although in general it's safe to say -- for good or ill -- that my standard is more inclusive that yours seems to be, based upon past posts.)

1) nothing
2) writer doesn't have better subject matter to use and should have just taken the day off.

What I read is a direct quote of an extemporaneous tour of the office where Bush had a mid-sentence change of direction. It's something that I think happens in lots of extemporaneous discussions, but the speaker is usually saved by the fact that no one is transcribing the conversation. Goodness knows I don't want to see a transcription of many of my conversations (or answering machine messages for that matter).

I find Bush to be less articulate than I'd like in a President, both to my sometimes amusement and chagrin, but the selected text isn't one of those times. Appears to be a simple human moment to these eyes.

(Brief aside - Prof. V., we know you don't like Bushisms. Get on with it. You have better stuff to say.)

At least part of the amusement value of the quote -- and of the last Bushism too -- is, surely, that a man who invokes his status as a "war president" regularly for tactical effect, whenever it is expedient, finds nothing objectionable in his making idle, incoherent chitchat for the press and public regularly. (Any more than he recognizes the effect on some members of the public of his vacation schedule during said "wartime.")

I think that Bush must having been moving around the office when he was giving the speech.

He was trying to highlight presidents that the German reporter would make a connection to, hence FDR and Kennedy. I understand that Kennedy is still revered to many Germans for his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, even though he said he was a donut and not what he meant to say, so I assume that's why Kennedy was mentioned.

It strikes me that for Pres. Bush, as most others, a perfect transcription of extemperaneous utterances is less than flattering.

Datapoint from a rabid Bush-hater:

The excerpt is pointless. It's not funny, ridiculous, etc.; it's not even all that inarticulate if one considers that it's apparently an unedited, verbatim transcript of an informal conversation that was no doubt accompanied by gestural cues.

Bush says a lot of stupid things. Some of them are actively dangerous. Some are funny. Slate sometimes captures them. But by and large, their "Bushism of the Day" segment is tired and unfunny; they're simply trying too hard.

Big deal nothing new from Bush and contrary to conventional wisdom not a sign of being inarticulate. Some would even say a sign of intelligence. The mind works faster than the mouth can speak. Think of Bush's speech like a tape recorder that keeps skipping ahead and you'll see the similarity.

I've typed transcripts and looked through interview notes for a coherent quote. When people are talking, they often start a sentence, jump or wander away and never return to the original sentence. When they're walking around and gesturing, they're even more likely to sound jumbled on a transcript because the non-verbal information is absent. Intelligent people, quoted precisely, often come across as incoherent and ungrammatical. Of course, that doesn't prove that Bush is intelligent. It proves nothing.

The most inarticulate thing about it is the phrase "is none other presidents used it." He should have said "was used by nine other presidents." Having read transcriptions of my deposition questions, I'm not one to point fingers. In truth, I think few people do consistently better. I see nothing funny in this at all.

But then I am a red-stater.

Well, it doesn't read well. On the page, it sounds pretty inarticulate. It's kind of hard to determine what he's referring to.

In person, and if we were able to hear inflections, pauses, etc., I would guess we'd be able to hear places where he was rewinding and rephrasing, interrupting himself, or switching topic suddenly, as we all tend to do when we're speaking conversationally.

It makes Bush look like an inarticulate buffoon. Which I think is the point.

It's pretty hard to tell what the point is. My only two guesses are a) the word "us" (though I don't see what is wrong with the first person plural as it could refer either to American presidents or the American people) or b) some kind of weird joke about the way in which JFK was killed.

Either way the quote seems completely unobjectionable to me, even taken out of context, and I agree with Eugene that marking it as a "Bushism" is bizarre.

Quick follow-up:

My best guess is that the author is trying to convey that a foreign visitor wouldn't know Bush is talking about JFK Jr.

...and therefore, Bush is dumb/naive for not catering to his audience and assuming they would know which JFK. Seems petty to me. As I said, the speaker could simply ask a follow-up question.

I suppose it attempts to mock his grammar: "is" in the first sentence, using "our" to refer to 19th c Presidents, etc.

To me Bush's syntax seems quite natural for someone chatting convesationally, dropping in paranethetical phrases about interesting points as they come to mind.

The first sentence is somewhat inarticulate, but is also typical of extemporaneous speech; it's no great secret that the President has trouble speaking off-the-cuff.

The sentence about John Kennedy comes across as ridiculous, though if one were there and could see the door - it sounds like some kind of dutch door based on the Roosevelt comment - it would probably make more sense. Lost on the page is any pantomiming the President might have done, illustrating how Kennedy stuck his head out the door. Also unknown is the identity of the audience; perhaps he/she/they know more about Kennedy than do I.