The death of Michael Jackson; Mackenzie Phillips' incest accusation; Kanye West's uber-interruption; Meghan McCain's PG-rated (at best) Twitpic: One of these things is not like the others, one of these things does not belong.

On The Huffington Post's list of Shocking 2009 Celebrity Scandals, the story of Meghan McCain's Twitpic-inspired firestorm seems to stick out like a...sore thumb. What's the real scandal here?

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Unless you live in a lead-encased cave, you've heard all about the punch that decked Snooki, the tiniest cast member of MTV's controversial new reality show, Jersey Shore. After showing the punch in previews for episode 3, MTV high-mindedly redacted the blow from the actual episode, and ran a PSA-style disclaimer at the end of the show.

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There were several disappointments at Thursday's Crasher-gate hearing, but chief among them were Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan's continued insistence that the now-famous security breach posed no threat to the President, and the committee's focus on Social Secretary Desiree Rogers' role in said breach.

Taken together with the media's initial narrative on the Social Secretary's Office, the right's targeting of her, and a heated broadside from the White House press corps, it seems some are taking the Secret Service's failure as an opportunity to settle scores with Desiree Rogers.

Initially, I shared the House Committee on Homeland Security's consternation at Rogers' absence from the hearing, but after further consideration, I'm not so sure. The committee members' interest in Rogers seemed to involve spreading some of the blame for the Secret Service's failure to turn away Michaele and Tareq Salahi, as they repeatedly questioned Sullivan as to whether the presence of a Social Office staffer would have prevented the breach. This is absurd on two counts.

First of all, this is the year 2009. You no longer have to actually be standing next to someone in order to communicate with them. The officers at that first checkpoint had an entire world of confirmation at their fingertips. The committee focused on the fact that there usually is a staffer present for state dinners, but they seemed ignorant of the fact that 99.99% of White House visitors are checked in by the Secret Service alone.

More absurd is the notion that the Secret Service needs backup from the White House social staff. If that's true, Sullivan should just hang it up. This would be akin to Batman blaming a defeat on the absence of Alfred, the butler.

Since Rogers' name first came up, however, there seems to have been a cauldron of resentment simmering just below the surface. A disgruntled former staffer came forward to complain about Rogers, and the right jumped at the chance to show how Rogers was yet another example of how Barack Obama is everything that's wrong with the world.

>>>NEXT: A transcript of Ryan's chat with Gibbs and a final defense of Desiree Rogers...

I'm at the House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Crashergate, where Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan spent the morning on the hot seat for his agency's failure to repel uninvited guests Michaele and Tareq Salahi from last Tuesday's White House state dinner. Among the revelations this morning is the embarrassing fact that, according to Sullivan, the Secret Service learned of the breach on Facebook. (more...)

As a Congressional hearing gets underway to drill down on how the uninvited Salahi couple managed to breach White House security, the White House has removed any and all doubt as to whether the Secret Service might have had a legitimate excuse for letting the couple past the first checkpoint. (more...)

The saga of would-be reality stars and accused White House Party Crashers Michaele and Tareq Salahi continues to unroll slowly, as NBC fortuitously scores scoop after scoop. The latest: The Salahis' attorney provided The Today Show with copies of their emails with Defense Department White House Liaison Michele Jones. If this is the bombshell evidence they promised to bring Matt Lauer in their meager Today interview Monday, they're in trouble. These emails are all smoke, no  gun. Given the very best possible interpretation, the emails show that Michelle Jones was working to get the Salahis tickets to the arrival ceremony prior to the dinner, but explicitly tells them that the dinner has been full up for months. The emails leave open the possibility, however unlikely, that the Salahis might attend the arrival if tickets became available. That leaves open the possibility that the couple passed through the first checkpoint as legitimate attendees of the arrival ceremony. I asked the White House about the arrival ceremony specifically, and a White House official told me that "the Salahi’s were not cleared to enter the White House grounds for any reason." Michele Jones never confirms either event for the couple in the emails, except to accept their thanks the following day. The crux of their defense, then, is that they went to the White House just to check if Jones had managed an 11th-hour miracle, and they say in a thank-you email that they were, indeed, on the list. The email conveniently explains that their cellphone battery had died, so they wouldn't have received any calls telling them not to go. The White House and the Secret Service have now fairly definitively ruled out every scenario that could vindicate the Salahis. While their future as reality TV stars may be bright, it looks like they could face serious trouble for what looks more and more like a ridiculous security breach.

At the heart of the story of Michaele and Tareq Salahi's big adventure at last week's state dinner is a security breach so unbelievable, I actually don't believe it. However, barring the emergence of exculpatory "stunning details" that were absent from this morning's useless "Today Show" interview, the President would do well to heed the alarm being sounded by Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and "In the President's Secret Service" author Ronald Kessler in this clip from yesterday's "Today Show." King calls Obama our "most threatened President ever," and Kessler says "it's only a matter of time before there's an assassination." (more...)

The latest development in the saga of the polo-playing, dove-throwing socialites who crashed the first state dinner of the Obama administration is something that we suggested yesterday: Michaele and Tareq Salahi may have had help from the inside. (more...)

As we head into the news hell that is a long holiday weekend, you can be sure to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the White House Party Crashers, Tareq and Michaele Salahi. Of primary concern is how this pair of Chester Cheetah-level socialites managed to brazenly blow their way past the Secret Service and into the White House for the ultra-exclusive State Dinner in the first place. My expert opinion? They didn't.

The Salahis, owners of the Oasis Winery and the America's Cup of Polo, are rumored to be part of Bravo's upcoming "Real Houeswives of DC" reality show. Actually, there are more than rumors. In September, the Salahis were spotted being trailed by a Bravo film crew, and Michaele Salahi's makeup artist reported seeing a TV crew filming them as they prepared to crash the state dinner. Though Bravo declined to make a statement yesterday (even to NBC News, part of its corporate family!), today Bravo reluctantly confirmed that a "Real Housewives" camera crew was ineed with the Salahis as they crashed their way to the most exclusive ticket in town. They've got a flair for the dramatic, as their cheese-tastic wedding video shows.Yes, they're throwing doves. (more...)

Last night on Countdown, Keith Olbermann did another in a long series of segments castigating former Miss California Carrie Prejean, but he added a little something extra at the end. He signs off the segment, in which he discusses the sex tape that features Prejean "by herself," with a two, then three, fingered "Girl Scout" salute. Where to begin? Here's the segment. Keith's salute is at the very end, and doesn't appear in MSNBC's version of the clip:
The gesture is either a fairly obvious attempt at shock humor, or an accidental one. Given MSNBC's history of thinly-veiled entendre, and the context here, I'd say it's the former. It's ironic that he uses a Girl Scout salute as the fig leaf since, unlike the Boy Scouts of America, the Girl scouts don't discriminate against gay people.

The joke is likely to delight many of Prejean's detractors, embittered toward her over her support of California's Proposition 8. Just as surely, it will offend many others who observe the double standard that Prejean points out in the segment. I find it emblematic of the wrongheadedness of the anti-Prejean narrative. The Carrie Prejean story began with an honest answer to a divisive question at a beauty pageant. Asked if she believed that same-sex marriage should be legal in all 50 states, she stated her personal belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman, but also said that she was happy to live in a country where people can choose "same-sex marriage or opposite marriage." As Jake Tapper pointed out, this position hews closely to that of President Obama. She was immediately and viciously attacked by Perez Hilton, the judge who asked the question, using vile misogynist slurs. The rest of the media piled on by mocking her use of the term "opposite marriage," elevating her to the status of media martyr. It was only then that she became useful to the National Organization for Marriage, and decided to support the dissolution of thousands of legal marriages. The response to this was to make fun of her breasts, compare her to a Nazi and a dog, leak R-rated pictures of her, and now, delight in the revelation of this sex tape. The point of this is supposed to be to expose her as a hypocrite, which eludes me somewhat. She's a model, so how do breast implants and sexy pictures make her a hypocrite? The fact that she sent a sex video to her boyfriend doesn't make her a hypocrite, it makes her an awesome girlfriend. No, the real point was to embarrass and humiliate her. The effect was not to silence, but to amplify her. What makes Carrie Prejean a hypocrite is her insistence that she wants to protect marriages by supporting laws that destroy them. If the left had focused more on that, and less on destroying her personally, Carrie Prejean would be a dim memory now. Instead, they get to be wrong right alongside her.

This is the kind of viral marketing that executives dare not even dream about.  In fact, while outlets like Gawker have come under fire for their use of sponsored content like Bloodcopy, the folks behind AMC's "Mad Men" are reaping huge PR dividends for free.  Their personalized icons have swept over Twitter like a nuclear daisy. If you've never heard of "Mad Men," that's kind of the point.  AMC's series about an early-sixties ad agency is high on critical acclaim, but hidden away on basic cable.  The show's pitch-perfect period reproduction takes you right back to the days of 3-martini lunches, chainsmoking everywhere, and the kind of casual racism and misogyny that make last year's presidential race seem all the more miraculous.  If Proust had been smoking a cigarette, this show is what it would have tasted like. (more...)