Holy guano, Batman – watch out for open microphones. Somebody gets a big whack in the wallet if one of them picks up the wrong word. There are things you just can’t say on TV.

President Bush came close this week. An open mike caught him chatting, mostly with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, at the closing lunch of the G-8 summit in Russia on Monday. Listeners heard his candid comments on matters of both large and little importance:

He expressed a preference for Diet Coke.

He marveled, apparently to Chinese President Hu Jintao, at how long it takes to fly home: “Gotta go home. Got something to do tonight. Go to the airport, get on the airplane and go home. How about you? Where are you going? Home? … This is your neighborhood. It doesn’t take you long to get home. How long does it take you to get home? … Eight hours? Me, too. Russia’s a big country and you’re a big country.”

He said he isn’t big on long speeches, or preparation, when asked about his closing talk: “No, just going to make it up. I’m not going to talk too damn long, like the rest of them.”

He said he would send Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the Middle East, complained about U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s emphasis on a cease-fire in Lebanon, and said Annan could “make something happen” if he got on the phone with Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom he called “Bashad.”

“See,” he added, “the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit.”

Oops.

Naturally, a few commentators clucked over his misuse of “irony” – a common mistake. Naturally, more noted his use of “shit.”

That sort of thing has happened before. In the 2000 campaign, for example, before a speech in Illinois, Bush was next to an open mike when he said to Dick Cheney: “There’s Adam Clymer, major league (expletive) from the New York Times.”

It’s more dangerous now, however, because of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005, which the president signed last month after Congress passed it in some election-year showboating.

The act raised the maximum fine for broadcast indecency to $325,000, per station, per violation – 10 times the previous level. It did not define the standard for indecency, which the Federal Communications Commission defines as “offensive sexual or excretory material.”

The standard is so broad and fuzzy that some TV stations were afraid to air the movie “Saving Private Ryan” because of the crackdown after “Nipplegate” at the 2004 Super Bowl. But the standard definitely includes “shit” and a slip of the tongue, or “fleeting profanity,” is no defense.

The Hollywood Reporter said last week that the FCC has requested numerous tapes from broadcasters “that might include vulgar remarks from unruly spectators, coaches and athletes at live sporting events.”

“They asked us for tapes with a specific emphasis on crowd noise,” one TV executive told the Reporter. “If some bozo in the crowd calls the ref an (expletive), the commission is asking for a copy.”

“It looks like they want to end live broadcast TV,” another TV executive said. “We already know that they aren’t afraid to go after news” because the FCC found the CBS News “Early Show” in violation after a guest slipped and used the same word the president used.

The FCC called it “one of the most offensive words in the English language,” which spells trouble for any over-the-air station that carried Bush’s lunch comments.

CNN, which ran them, is safe because the FCC doesn’t regulate content on cable or satellite – yet. Some lawmakers want to change that.

“It’s a bad trend, a bad sign” that “the language is becoming coarser,” the president said as he signed the Decency Act. “People are saying, we’re tired of it, and we expect the government to do something about it.” Tired of this “shit,” he might have said, but it would not have been appropriate.

He knew the mike was open.