The Illinois Supreme Court has just, without comment, rejected what was in essence a coup attempt by the state Attorney General, which would have installed the Lieutenant Governor in Governor Blagojevich's place. Attorney General Lisa Madigan's legal reasoning was, to put it mildly, unique. She tried to make the case that the Governor was "unfit for duty" and therefore had to be replaced so the state could continue to function. The entire episode raises a bigger question: could this ever happen to the President of the United States? The answer turns out to be: "Yes, but... it'll probably never happen."

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This is not a follow up to what I wrote last Friday, because this isn't about Illinois Governor Blagojevich's "crude" language. Instead, I write today about Blaggy's crude tactics. Because I'm kind of having a hard time condemning him for doing almost the same thing as what other politicians do more successfully (and completely "legally") with a wink and a nod. There's a game, and there are certain rules to the game. Blaggy went a bit too far, and was caught. He is now paying the price. But what he "got caught" at isn't that all that different from what many (if not most) politicians -- of both parties -- do.

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I know it's a lot more interesting to talk about two shoes getting thrown at President Bush in Iraq, but two more important stories are getting ignored as a result. These are two metaphorical "shoes" thrown at Bush, by the Senate and by Bush's own Inspector General in Iraq. And they're going to have a much more lasting impact on how history sees our Iraq adventure than one video clip of a guy hucking his footwear at President Bush. Because they deal with torture, and the failure of the Iraq reconstruction effort.

Last Thursday, Carl Levin's Senate Armed Services Committee released a report which basically called Bush and his entire National Security Council war criminals. Of note was the fact that the Senate committee voted for the report unanimously. Every single Republican (led by John McCain), along with all the Democrats, voted for this report. And the language the report uses is not the usual vague "mistakes were made" sort (which is often a necessity forced upon the such committees as a whole, by one party or another).

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The history of profanity in American political discourse is an untold story out there just waiting for someone to research and write about -- although finding a willing publisher might be a bit of a problem. Because it seems we're back to the Nixonian days of "[expletive deleted]."

I speak not just of Rod Blagojevich, but also of those who speak of him. In other words, all who bowdlerize or otherwise sanitize his direct quotes. Quite literally -- in other words.

One of the more amusing historical stories of bowdlerization in American politics is John Nance Gardner's description of the Vice President's office being "not worth a bucket of warm piss." Gardner was F.D.R.'s veep for two terms, so it is assumed he knew what he was talking about. But this quote was changed (and misquoted for decades) to "... a warm bucket of spit." Gardner himself reportedly called one writer who used the cleaned-up version a "pantywaist," proving that he was probably one of those politicians it would be fun to have a beer with (he also sounds like he would kick your ass if you called him by his middle name).

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With slightly less than a month and a half to go before Barack Obama's inauguration, Washington, D.C. has officially reached the "freakout" point on the Richter scale of event planning. This may indeed turn out to be justified, if the predicted crowd shows up. Even so, some of what is quietly happening in background of the planning process is worth drawing attention to.

The estimated crowd size for the event varies (depending on who you ask), from a low of one million people to a high of four or five million people. That would be seven or eight times as many people actually live in Washington, it's worth pointing out. George Bush pulled a crowd of around 300,000 the last time around, but the record Obama will likely beat is Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 (one year after Kennedy was assassinated) who saw from 1.2 million to 1.7 million on the District's streets (estimates vary). Such numbers began overwhelming D.C. shortly after Obama won the election (as this hilarious Toles cartoon from 11/13/08 shows). Upon reflection, though, the District got caught up in a "boomtown" mentality -- which is only going to get more frenzied as the event draws nearer.

Of special note in the thick of this lunacy is Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC), who is leading the charge against the prospect that D.C. could turn in to some sort of freezing-cold Mardi Gras. Two out of the following three "Inauguration News" items involve Senator DiFi's recent actions. In keeping with her "tablets handed down on the mountaintop" theme, I hereby present these as "Inauguration Commandments."

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[Note: This is the second of a two-part series. The first installment ran yesterday, and covered the first half of the Iraq SOFA in detail.]

The Status Of Forces Agreement ("SOFA") between Iraq and the United States covers wide-ranging and significant issues between the two countries.

It also covers the trivial and insignificant as well. I don't know why, but this paragraph in Article 18 -- "Official and Military Vehicles" -- seemed to me to be about the most trivial in the entire document. So we start today's look at the SOFA with a very small-bore issue.

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There has been a lot of ink spilled over the ramifications of the agreement recently struck between the United States and Iraq on our presence there for the next three years. The Status Of Forces Agreement ("SOFA") was passed by the Iraqi Parliament and signed by all three members of the Iraqi Executive Council, meaning it will have the force of law come the first of January, 2009. President Bush has decided that his signature was enough for America to enter the agreement, so Congress never got their say on the document. But with such commentary flying left and right, I thought I would go to the document itself to see what it actually says (versus how people are interpreting it).

What I found is that the Iraqis got almost everything they had pushed for, and the Bush administration got almost nothing of what they wanted. This agreement was tailored for Iraq's political situation, and not America's. The Iraqis used a combination of a ticking clock and their own public pressure to insist on several points that must have horrified the Bush people. Actually, two ticking clocks -- our own elections (and Bush's lame duck status), and the fact that the United Nations authorization for us being in Iraq expires at the end of this year. Neither country, for their own individual reasons, wanted to extend the U.N. mandate, and Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki used this as a giant lever to get pretty much everything he wanted from Bush.

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Brian Williams, NBC's talking head extraordinaire, is probably a decent guy, a guy with whom you could sit down and have a beer. [More on the alcohol subject at the end, I promise.] But that doesn't excuse something he said last night on Jay Leno's show.

And no, I'm not referring to his faulty math. If my ears didn't deceive me, I heard him say Obama won the election with a vote of 53 percent to 49 percent. Um... OK... "six out of five doctors" may recommend you think about those numbers a bit, Brian, before you quote them again.

While that was amusing, BriWi's other comment was not. He suggested -- not joking around, but with a straight face -- that we call our current economic crisis a name the Irish have used for decades to describe the Northern Ireland standoff: "The Troubles." This is incredibly insensitive and outrageous, because Williams is suggesting that we equate bailing out Wall Street and the car companies with a conflict which has, to date, cost about as many lives as 9/11. Since BriWi's not a Democrat, I can't give him a "Most Disappointing" award, so instead I will just award him a gigantic dunce cap. Instructions: put on head, sit in corner, and think hard about what you just said.

Sheesh.

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I am normally not much inclined to give California Senator Dianne Feinstein the benefit of the doubt, mostly because I have a good enough memory to recall the dozens of times she has earned the "DINO" (Democrat In Name Only) label for voting with Republicans. She's not my favorite senator, in other words. She's not even my favorite senator from California -- and likely never will be as long as Barbara Boxer is still serving. But I have to say, the recent kerfluffle over her comments on torture and the Army Field Manual seem to me to be a tempest in a teapot. I am willing to take her at her word that she was quoted out of context in the New York Times, and I am also willing to take her at her word in the clarification of her comments she has subsequently issued.

If you're unaware of the fracas between DiFi (as she is known in the Golden State) and the media (and the blogosphere), here is the offending text from the Times article:

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I'm going to make a prediction here (one I have mentioned in passing before): Barack Obama is going to do something to absolutely enrage leftists, progressives, and the few remaining Americans who actually call themselves liberals; and, furthermore, he's going to do it within his first 100 days in office. The only thing I won't predict is what that "something" is going to be.

I say this for numerous reasons. Even before Obama started announcing his cabinet picks, he showed over and over again that he was more of a centrist kind of guy than anyone would give him credit for. The right wing, of course, was going apoplectic over Obama (Socialist! Radical! Ultra-liberal!) while at the same time conveniently ignoring George Bush handing out free money to Wall Street, or (for that matter) Sarah Palin running her state's government on a strict "redistribution of wealth" philosophy. But it should also be noted that the left wing was building their own caricature of Obama, one that looked strikingly like the one the right wing was building -- "Obama, the Mighty Progressive." The left refused to take Obama at his word when he spoke of compromise, post-partisan politics, or reaching across the aisle. Leftists everywhere consoled themselves by thinking, "He's just saying that to get elected, once he gets in there, he'll pass everything on our agenda and we'll be so strong in Congress that it'll actually happen."

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