Washington, Dec 24 (IANS) The White House gate-crashing caper has won a celebrity chasing couple who strolled uninvited into President Barack Obama’s state dinner for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “Persons of the Year” title from a leading US daily.
“The Reliable Source Persons of the Year” title for Michaele and Tareq Salahi though comes from the gossip column of the Washington Post’s Style section.

“Heck, the only way Tareq and Michaele Salahi could have missed being our Persons of the Year was if we’d made them Persons of the Decade instead,” the columnists said describing their choice as “No disrespect to some of our column’s 2009 favourites (Alex Ovechkin, Tara Wheeler, Levi Johnston).”

“But the Salahis took what could have been an enjoyably seedy little horse-country melodrama and catapulted it into the gossip stratosphere with one fateful night at the White House that exposed the dark secrets of our decade’s major growth industries: national security and reality television,” they said.

“You hated us for making you want to read about them, and still you kept begging for more. Will they get prosecuted? Will they get a TV show? Too many questions that will have to wait till 2010,” the Post said.