Here in part is what I wrote after Tareq and Michaele Salahi crashed the Obamas’ first state dinner last November:
[T]his whole farce was concocted by these two nincompoops as an audition to appear on the reality TV program The Real Housewives of D.C… I’ve seen an episode of one of these now franchised programs (The Real Housewives of New Jersey). And they amount to nothing more than a gaggle of self-absorbed women acting out scripted scenes from their nouveau-riche lives, exhibiting all of the intelligence, talent and class of water buffalos rolling around in mud.
No doubt this is why it seemed perfectly sensible to these two wannabes to crash this White House dinner, with reality TV cameras rolling, for the sole purpose of sucking up to celebrities to notch pictures on their Facebook page the way kids do to notch signatures in their autograph books.
Mind you, I think casting the Salahis as harmless party crashers is a mistake. After all, they exhibited potentially dangerous, passive-aggressive delusions on the TODAY show on Tuesday as they were muttering on about their invitation that was evidently lost in email transmissions….
Frankly, I don’t understand why the Secret Service isn’t using all of its power to put this couple in jail…
(Party crashers expose Obama’s vulnerability…, The iPINIONS Journal, December 3, 2009)
Well, no less an authority than the New York Times reported yesterday that the Salahis will be starring on reality TV beginning this summer. Not surprisingly, the producers consider the publicity generated by their White House stunt a godsend, which makes the Salahis now as indispensable to the ratings success of The Real Housewives of D.C. as Charlie Sheen is to the success of Two And A Half Men.
Silly me, I thought they’d be wallowing in jail by now. In the meantime, the Salahis have become such a national embarrassment that, in his latest warning of America’s impending doom, al Qaeda mouthpiece Adam Gadahn mocked, quite accurately, that if Obama can’t keep them out of the White House, he has no chance of keeping al Qeada terrorists out of the United States.
More to the point, though, the Salahis’ perverse celebrity explains why a father would risk his 16-year-old daughter’s life by having her sail around the world alone, or why another would blow hot air to the police about his 6-year-old son flying off in a homemade balloon, just to appear on reality TV. In fact, reality TV has made celebrity so commonplace that the proverbial 15 minutes of fame only serves as an audition now for the season or two of fame these common folk now covet.
But nothing indicates what a D-list production this “Housewives” franchise is quite like the fact that the producers could not get the wife of a single politician to appear on this show.
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Party crashers expose Obama’s vulnerability
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