As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Although the White House Press office worked hard to minimize the scope of the Tareq and Michaela Salahis state dinner party crashing, this shot of Michaela shaking hands with President Obama says it all. Two people walked off the street, into the post-9/11 White House and shook hands with the President of the United States.

There is a lot of finger-pointing going on, and almost on cue, at least one person--Ronald Kessler, author of a book on the Secret Service, is using the incident to shill for a doubling or tripling of the Secret Service budget (yeah--throw money at the problem!). Yet no one seems to be asking what I consider to be the obvious question--in an environment where the public perception of Presidential security is that its virtually impregnable, these two 'nobodies' dismissed that notion, bought a fancy dress for the occasion and executed a clearly well-conceived plan to crash the a state dinner.

Its not just a question of cojones, but of some advance knowledge that the attempt would have a good chance at success.

The incident suggests several possibilities--Secret Service protection of the President is so lax, that ways and means to circumvent it are dinner-party talk in the Capital region; or the Salahis were patsies for some unknown subject who exploited their need for attention by giving them a way to get it--a plan to get into the White House and be photographed meeting the President.

The implications of this incident are far-reaching to say the least. It suggests not only that White House security is in complete disarray, but that someone with intimate familiarity with its defects has possibly engineered an incident designed to embarrass the Secret Service and possibly the President.

Or it could be something far more mundane.

My guess is that something like this has happened before, perhaps many times. The egos of Capital region socialites would fairly demand that they publicly recount the time they went to a White House function and weren't "on the list", but were waved through anyways because "everyone knew" that it had to be a mistake. Upon hearing this a few times, the Salahis figured they could pull off the same trick.

Loose lips, sink ships...