Yesterday, Salahi had alerted the news media that she “may have been kidnapped or abducted and being held under duress” and called upon the public to “be on the look out for her, and if found please contact the authorities and please approach her and contact the authorities to intervene and that she may be forced to say she is okay, when in fact she is not and being held under possible abduction.”

Salahi’s worst fears were unfounded, but much to his chagrin, she was in the company of Schon in Memphis.

According to Good Morning America, “Hours after (Tareq) made a public plea for help in finding his wife, whom he believed had been kidnapped Tuesday, Virginia’s Warren County Sheriff’s Office released a statement saying authorities had spoken with Michaele Salahi and she was “fine” and “where she wanted to be.””

“Tareq is devastated but he is relieved to know that Michaele is safe and is okay,” said Tareq’s attorney, David Silek on GMA Thursday.

He added that divorce talk was premature, and won’t stop believing that the Salahis can work things out. “If there’s an opportunity for reconciliation, that’s something they can and ought to explore.”

Watch the segment below, courtesy of ABC News:

From TMZ:

“Tareq has issued a statement saying, ‘We are reaching to the public pleaing [sic] desperately for your help.’

He continues, ‘It is our belief as of last night, that Michaele Salahi may have been kidnapped or abducted and being held under duress and forced to tell persons, including authorities she is okay.

We are asking the public to please be on the look out for her, and if found please contact the authorities and please approach her and contact the authorities to intervene and that she may be forced to say she is okay, when in fact she is not and being held under possible abduction.

The Salahi family can be reached at 540-635-9933.’”

Hopefully this is all a misunderstanding and Michaele will turn up safe and sound.

There’s not much I can say that competes with actually watching Salahi’s performance. I think she’s finally discovered her true calling, and it involves combining some words about dancing and animals and being hot with over the wails of a slowly drowning cockatoo while stilt-walking in one-third of an outfit. So fun.

Anyway. Here is some art, via NBC’s Miami affiliate:

h/t BuzzFeed

Michaele Salahi was inspired to do something with her voice, when she was back stage with Grammy award winner Bebe Winans and television host Oprah Winfrey at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. during the inauguration of President Barack Obama. It was a defining moment backstage when Oprah told Michaele, “Wow, you have an amazing voice!”

There’s an awesome bit of pop culture trivia! Only… it ain’t true. Our sister site, GossipCop, looked into the story, and found out the truth from Winfrey’s rep:

Winfrey’s rep tells Gossip Cop, “Oprah briefly met Ms. Salahi backstage at the Kennedy Center after an Oprah Show taping in January 2009. However, there’s absolutely no truth to the report that they discussed Ms. Salahi’s vocal abilities.”

And there you have it.

h/t GossipCop

Yep, Michaele Salahi has been kicked out of Celebrity Rehab after show host Dr. Drew Pinski decided she was just too darn healthy. From E! News:

“‘The treatment program that Celebrity Rehab documents is intended for individuals with serious substance abuse and addiction issues,’ VH1 said in a statement to E! News. ‘Prior to the taping of the current season, producers were advised that Michaele Salahi met the criteria to be treated in this setting. However, professional assessments spanning from that time to the present, found that she did not meet such criteria.

‘As a result, she is no longer participating in the program.’”

Now, in all fairness to Salahi, it would appear she never claimed to be an addict (someone from the show contact me if I’m wrong).

Her husband Tareq Salahi explained to Radar that she was actually there to deal with her stress following the White House scandal as well as Multiple Sclerosis.

“Tareq adds that Michaele takes her condition seriously and that it was the show that wanted her to pretend to be something she wasn’t. Tareq says he now has plans of exposing the makings of reality shows on national television.

‘My wife takes her health situation very seriously, she has a real diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. You know, we can show you a bunch of emails about what they wanted her to pretend to be, therefore, but that’s going to come out later on with one of the major networks.’”

Ah, good. They’re going to be doing huge interviews about this.

You know, maybe Dr. Drew made her leave because he discovered she actually was addicted but that she was addicted to meaningless fame. If so, he probably kicked her out so that his camera men wouldn’t be her dealers.

In a totally unrelated note, the clip below ends with a statement from the Salahis’ lawyer once again stressing that they were invited to that White House party.

Here’s how it apparently went down, from Gossip Cop:

“Goldberg was not in the segment, but as the conversation went on and on between Joy Behar, Sherri Shepherd, and the D.C. Housewives, Goldberg stepped onto the show’s set, lightly tapped Salahi’s back, and told her, ‘Excuse me, can you get back to the White House, please,’ meaning she wanted Salahi to return to the subject of how she and her husband Tareq crashed President Obama’s state dinner last fall.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

Later, after hearing that Salahi was claiming she had “hit” her, an exasperated Goldberg went backstage to a room where the Salahis were, and got into a screaming match with the crashers.”

The Salahis are now accusing Goldberg of attacking Michaele. This is the official ABC response:
“At one point during Michaele Salahi’s appearance on The View on Wednesday, Whoopi lightly touched Ms. Salahi to get her attention and said to her ‘Excuse me, can you get back to the White House, please?’, meaning could Ms. Salahi return to the original subject of the conversation. After the show, Ms. Salahi and her husband accused Whoopi of hitting Ms. Salahi. As the broadcast clearly shows, the accusation was completely unfounded and erroneous. After the show and after being told she was being accused of hitting Ms. Salahi, Whoopi proceeded to defend herself verbally from this baseless claim in a heated exchange with the Salahis.”

I like how, after Michaele discussed her absurd made up drink throwing drama with her vapid castmates and after Goldberg gives her that quick jab, the other hosts let their displeasure with the White House crasher be known and Salahi uses the same condescending response she used on Lynn Berry a few months ago. “Have you ever been to the White House?” What lovely people the Salahis are.

Goldberg will be responding to the accusations on today’s show.

UPDATE: Check out Goldberg’s response here.

The Salahis have joined forces with investigative reporter Diane Dimond: “[The team] will lay out “behind-the-scenes” details of the November 2009 night when they bamboozled the Secret Serviceand got into a state dinner for India’s prime minister.”

Dimond told the Post the Salahis’ story has “‘genuine intrigue’ with twists that ‘can be traced right back to the White House.’”

This does not come as much of a surprise, but only time will tell if the investigative piece makes a big splash or goes unnoticed.

What may surprise some, but not the cynics, is the Salahi’s White House crashing was filmed for an episode, and will be part of the show too.

Lisa de Moraes of The Washington Post confirmed the news, and has the full breakdown of the upcoming Housewives – although the real stars will be The Salahis.

From the initial incident in November through their PR push in December, Bravo denied Michaele Salahi was guaranteed to be part of the Housewives cast, just that the couple was being filmed as potential cast members. But Andy Cohen, Senior Vice President at Bravo and host of all Housewives specials and a late-night show on the network, writes in detail on The Huffington Post about the decision to include the couple, and the crashing. And it appears their involvement in the finished product was practically a given.

We learned the following day — as did everyone else, including the other D.C. Housewives — of the alleged “gate crashing” incident. At the core of the reaction was the question of whether or not the Salahis had been invited. But one of the by-products of the aftermath was continued false reporting that somehow the Salahis had used the State Dinner as a ‘stunt’ to be cast on the show. The fact is that by November we had been shooting the series with Michaele and the other women for months. In fact, we were a few weeks away from wrapping photography on the series. Any idea that attending the State Dinner was an audition to cement participation in the show is preposterous.

In other words, they were already cast members of Bravo. Were they still cast members when they were stopped by Secret Service last month near the state dinner? Will that be part of a future episode?

It also means they were already cast members of Bravo when they chose to avoid CNN and conducted their first interview with the Today show, keeping up the charade throughout. What’s most embarrassing however, is the charade seeped into the NBC News world. No disclosure was made during that December 1 interview, and yet these interviewees were not just party crashers – they were cast members on an NBCU TV show. Maybe Matt Lauer will get to be part of the Real Housewives episode too.

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Today they were on MSNBC to talk about their latest run in with the Secret Service. Considering all the rumors that the Salahis will be starring in a series on MSNBC’s sister network Bravo soon (coincidence!: they also showed up on the Today show this morning), the Salahis were probably expecting a puff piece interview. But that is not what MSNBC’s Lynn Berry gave them. Things got very uncomfortable, very quickly.

Since I’m going to assume that many of you could care less about what the Salahis have to say (blah blah blah, it’s all a misunderstanding, it’s the media’s fault for blowing it up, blah blah), I suggest that you instead use the interview as a demonstration in what happens when public personas begin to slip. Watch as Lynn Berry’s cheerful TV facade gives way to the hatred of this couple buried underneath (probably beginning around the point when Michaele condescendingly tells her she doubts that Berry’s ever been to a big fundraiser before). Then delight as the Salahis begin to lose their heavily rehearsed friendly exterior (starting right after Berry has the gall to ask a follow-up question). My favorite point is the withering glare that Berry gives them right around the 6:07 point of the video below. Seeing it, I’m personally shocked that the couple didn’t melt right there on the spot.

Normally I’d say that the Salahis were the losers of this segment. However, they did get on television and, in the fame-hunting game, the standards for victory are very low.

“Considering the White House’s hulking, media-rich Web site, its Facebook page, photo galleries and podcasts on iTunes, the presidency seems less threatened by the incursion of a reality show than running an administration that is in danger of becoming one.”

– David Carr, New York Times media columnist, describing the ” all-Obama, all-the-time” era “that concluded in a reality-program couple crashing a state dinner at the White House.”

David Carr’s latest New York Times column, “Reality TV’s Glare Hits High Office,” has more zingers than Obama has photo ops, as he suggests the president scale back on the “oversharing.”

Carr accuses the “Celebrity in Chief” of dumbing down the role of a leader, creating “the impression that the leader of the free world is part of a milieu that is more TMZ than C-SPAN.” His evidence is largely pop cultural: Big Brother, Oprah, Vogue, Facebook and, of course, the White House-crashing Salahi couple and the Real Housewives of D.C. “Perhaps the Salahis were just taking the president at his word when he promised a new era of openness,” Carr suggests.

It’s just not special anymore, Carr argues, to see Barack Obama acting like a normal person, and it just might be bad for his presidency. But intuitive quotes from a VH1 exec and West Wing producer don’t do anything to support Carr blaming Obama, himself.

The Kennedys, Carr writes, balanced politics and celebrity correctly, and he quotes Jackie O saying, “I want to live my life, not record it.” But in the forty-plus years since JFK’s presidency, the press has become insatiable and Carr’s column avoids pointing the finger back at the cable news stations with 24-hours to fill, the struggling but celeb-obsessed magazine world, or yes, even the New York Times.

Last month, Mediaite’s Glynnis MacNicol suggested that politics are our new national pastime, and that media organizations were left scrambling as the 2008 election ended, with nothing compelling left to cover. “The answer increasingly appears to be that they will merely find other elections and/or turn everything into a race,” she wrote. That, or a reality show, apparently. And that’s not to say that the Obamas are not themselves complicit, but in Carr’s column one suspect — the media itself — gets off surprisingly unmentioned.

Responding to the story last night on Twitter, NYU professor and press critic Jay Rosen wondered about the assumption that the press know “what the right level of exposure is.” And if so, “How?” Salon’s editor-in-chief Joan Walsh put it thusly: “They’re blaming Obama for their bad, shallow, celebrity focused coverage of him.” That is, “it’s self-correction for the way they sold the Obama ‘brand’ (shallowly).” And though Carr’s column is indeed zingy, it might also be self-incriminating.

The Social Media Presidency [New York Times]

(photo)

Unlike Balloon Boy (which was technically fake extreme reality, I suppose) — all signs point to the Salahis wanting to be caught. After their escapade to the White House, with cameras in tow no less, they posted pictures of themselves with high level politicos on their Facebook — though the White House was actually responsible for making available the money shot (as it were). Now the couple is shopping their story around to the highest bidder (maybe). This is not a couple that appears to be terribly caught off guard by the hoopla surrounding their presidential partying.

Whether it works out in their favor remains to be seen — we all know how Balloon Boy ended up. The Secret Service interviewed the couple (for free we assume) over the weekend and says they still may press charges. Ed Rollins, appearing on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday (video below), is understandably quie angry about the whole thing and thinks the couple should be charged for trespassing. He went so far as to suggest an entirely new reality show premise for them: “These people want a reality TV show, give them one. It’s called ‘Dealing With the Federal Prosecution System of the District of Columbia.’”

Former White House press secretary Dana Perino, appearing on “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace” thinks that with the White House holiday season about to kick into full swing, this is just the tip of the iceberg: “What will be a concern for, I think, the social office going forward is they have their busiest season coming up. It’s the holiday season. They’ll have a lot of people coming through.” Or not. It’s entirely possible the Salahi’s have ruined Christmas for everyone. Just imagine the sort of background checks future guests are going to be required to undergo.

And with “as many as 1,000 reality participants on television at any given moment” one has to assume this is just the beginning of some sort of weird trend that will probably result in the President livestreaming events from an undisclosed location because no one will ever be allowed into the White House ever again.

–The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board on the Salahi gate-crashing incident

The media has yet to come to a consensus over the meaning of “Crashgate.” Some outlets see the news that socialites Michaele and Tareq Salahi were able to get past state dinner security and even snap photos with President Obama as an alarming sign of poor security, some find fault with the Obama administration itself, and some think that the whole affair is funny. Not to be overlooked: it is possible that the Salahis had help from the inside.

The members of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s editorial board, for their part, does not think that the incident is a laughing matter. If they’re not explicitly calling for the heads of Secret Service or White House staff, they at least see their firings as inevitable.

But is that fair? A poll: do you think anyone should be fired over the incident? Who, if anyone, do you think is at fault?

The AP reports:

The Secret Service is looking into its security procedures after determining that the Virginia couple managed to slip into Tuesday night’s event even though they were not on the guest list, agency spokesman Ed Donovan said.

President Barack Obama was never in any danger because the Salahis went through the same security screening for weapons as the 300-plus people actually invited to the dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Donovan said.

Donovan confirmed the identities of the couple. The Washington Post, which first reported on their evening out, said the Salahis were well-known in the Virginia horse-country set and were being considered for the Bravo reality TV show “Real Housewives of D.C.”

Michaele Salahi reportedly did an interview with CBS’ “Early Show” a few months ago and said, “President Obama has made it very accessible for anyone to visit the White House, so that’s like a big thing right now.” Literally, it seems.