A friend wondered why Sarah Palin so often inserts the word "there" gratuitously into her statements:
"There was deception there..."
"Barack Obama though, another story there."
Below is my off-the-cuff response to that question, ah, there:
A linguist would probably have a precise term for such a construction; but my own amateur take is it's a verbal crutch she has developed to compensate for a lack of precision in her thinking and a lack of mastery of sentence and paragraph structure.
If struggling to construct a precise and compelling thought on the fly, and more descriptive words fail her or the rhythm is off, inserting "there" helps her make the idea sound more fully formed than it actually is. It is a sort of final brushstroke she adds to her verbal creations, hoping it will add a shiny finish to the blurry picture she just painted.
Bush has similar problems with an his own (even more) evident lack of command of the language. He treats ideas, groups, factoids as lumps of clay to be pushed around a virtual verbal grid... hoping that if he keeps moving them around, they might land by chance in some harmonious configuration.
Palin's use of "there" betrays this same problem of confusing ideas/facts with self-contained and unwieldy objects. She says "there" as if she were lifting up a heavy, difficult baby and setting it down across the room, hoping it will stop crying.
As with Bush, one gets the impression that she doesn't read much -- otherwise, she'd have picked up more of a feeling for these structures.
... Or maybe the extra "there" is just some regional tic.
Anyway, it's a theory. I'll leave you with George Orwell, from his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language":
[T]he decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.