Karl Klockars

Considering it’s been a really slow news week – where’s a balloon boy when you need him? – the White House Crashers, the Salahis, have pretty much been wall to wall for the past few days.  When there’s not new updates about what Tiger Woods may or may not have said about ruining Thanksgiving to report on, that is.

But after all the many hours and hours of woe-is-us and handwringing and “did they have an invitation or didn’t they” has come and gone (well, starting to go) I haven’t heard anyone say anything about the following:  We should also be thanking them.  And for a couple of different reasons.

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that yes, they could have sneezed a pile of anthrax into the face of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.  They didn’t, and let’s all be thankful for that.  (It’s the time of year for that, from what I’m told.)  And nothing motivates a person or a group like abject humiliation.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been verbally or textually embarassed in print, online, in front of your friends – maybe you’re the most perfect and popular person in the world, and in which case thanks for spending your valuable time reading this blither.  But since those types are few and far between, I’m assuming we’ve all felt some sort of humiliation during our lives.  And did it make you bust your ass to make it never happen again?  I bet it did.

So now that the Secret Service has been thoroughly spanked, I’m guessing they’re going to do their damnedest to find a way to make sure that this will never happen again.  And if they need more money to do what they need to do – protect a President that faces security challenges that no other President has had to stare down – then I think they just might get it.

There was no way to ever make something like that happen barring an attack or an attempted attack – or something like a huge media event over a slow news weekend that gets blown up into a huge to-do where no one gets hurt, and Bravo gets a little extra press.  I think were we to go back 3 weeks into the past and ask most people (barring a few counties in the reddest of states) which they’d prefer, almost everyone would take the last “public humiliation” option.  And we got it – and hopefully we have a safer President for it.  Thank you, Salahis.  Even though you look like sleazebags right now, maybe someday someone will shake your hand for being sleazebags for the good of the country.

Second – in the wake of CrasherGate (a name which sounds more like the name of a fictional superhero – “Crasher Gate, at your service” – than anything else) we have everyone rallying around the fact that there was a possibility that there could have been an attack on the President of the United States.  The root outrage of CrasherGate is that someone could have done something if they were in a mood to do so.  And I haven’t heard anyone (although I could have missed it) say anything to the effect of that they would have been okay if something had happened.

Yes, I know, I know, you can’t actually say anything really close to hoping that something would happen to the President, in terms of attacks or assassinations, at least not in the press.  (I’m actually looking around my shoulders right now to try to spot the Secret Service moving in around my desk here at work.  Just in case.)

But even the hint that someone might come close to expressing that thought – nowhere.  Not from Glenn Beck, not from Michelle Bachman, not from Sarah Palin, not in public anywhere.  And you know if there’s any hay to be made in terms of outrage and ratings and support from the crazy right-wing base, they’d jump all over it.  It’s justification that no matter what, at least in public, we may disagree on many things but we all can agree that we don’t want anyone to do anything to the person we elected President.  It’s a nice thought that we wouldn’t be considering if not for the jerkwad “everyone look at me” mindset of two loopy attention-starved individuals.

So when you feel like you’ve reached total media saturation about the White House State Dinner Crashers, look into their soulless eyes and try to appreciate what they have really done for us.  They might have made things a little bit better just by wanting everyone to look at them.  We’re looking now.  If you don’t like it, we’re sorry, but you’re stuck with it.  And thanks for being jerks.