The Salahis: Getting Paid for Not Being 'Tardy for the Party'

The party-crashing scandal involving Tareq and Michaele Salahi is a total misunderstanding. Really. Social secretaries of a certain delicate age may have shuddered uncontrollably as they prepared their Thanksgiving soirees thinking about the Virgina socialites invading President Obama's first "state" dinner. But those "fossils of etiquette" got it all wrong.To borrow a line from that denizen of techno music, Kim Zolciak of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, the Salahis couldn't be tardy for the party. The Salahis are celebrity-wise and they understand that a photo op and first dibs on the green curry prawns and the sparkling chardonnay, Thibaut Janisson Brut, Monticello, Virginia, among 400 starving luminaries, was a phenomenal achievement that would make TMZ gasp.

The Salahis also are wise to the fact that spreading the story of their social-climbing accomplishment offers fringe benefits. Armed with a photo with the president himself, coupled with the mystery of how they slipped past Secret Service and the White House staff, the Salahis are covered with magic media dust. The couple reportedly canceled their interview with CNN's Larry King and are now shopping their story around. The Associated Press reports that a television executive "who spoke on condition of anonymity" said that Salahi representatives "contacted networks to urge them to 'get their bids in' for an interview." The executive said the Virginia couple was looking for a payment in the mid-six figures range.

Our country is struggling to dig itself out of debt and determine whether to deploy more troops to Afghanistan. Carving out a career as a reality TV star, however, is apparently a good way to activate our collective imagination and help others during crisis. It doesn't matter that this "tuxedo crime" may be investigated as a criminal case or that it exposed a security breach at the very top of our government while foreign dignitaries were present. Who cares? Breaches, smeeches.

What matters in the field of play for those who seek celebrity is that their door-busting method worked. Eureka! However the Salahis got in, they hit the celebrity jackpot. The cumulative effect of the Salahis' skills to glide past presidential protocol nearly reduced an official dinner to the sophomoric sport of Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn laughing past the bride and groom in the "Wedding Crashers."

All of us "fossils of etiquette" (and of homeland security) should just get over it.