Most of us have several layers of Facebook friends. We have the really, true friends whom we actually like to spend time with offline — they were friends before you had to extend a formal invitation; we have acquaintances and business associates who we know, but don’t really know “like that”; and we have some folks who we’ve never actually encountered in the real world, but because they were FB friends with 28 of our other FB friends we took the site’s suggestion and made them our “friend” too. Then there are the other I-don’t-even-remember-when-how-or-why-this-person-is-a-friend friends who mined your friends, and your friends’ friends like prospectors looking for gold and then somehow they magically appear in your world.
Such seems to be the case with Michele Jones, the Pentagon’s White House liaison, and the most successful party crashers since Vince Vaughn showed us how in the movie, The Wedding Crashers — Tareq and Michaele Salahi.
Michele S. Jones has the total package. She’s sharp, articulate and attractive. Known as a stirring motivational speaker, Jones was tapped to address the 2008 Democratic National Convention. As the U.S. Army Reserve’s first female command sergeant major, the highest rank an enlisted person can achieve, this now retired but still commanding sister also had to be quite tough and strategic. Unfortunately, CSM Jones never saw the land mine that was waiting for her on Facebook.
It seems that Jones is a Facebook friend of the Salahi’s attorney, Paul W. Gardner, and through his online relationship with her, the Salahi’s began an e-mail conversation about the White House dinner, but according to Jones, she told them it was not an affair she could get them into.
“I did not state at any time, or imply that I had tickets for any portion of the evening’s events,” CSM Jones said in a statement released by the White House late Monday. “I specifically stated that they did not have tickets and in fact that I did not have the authority to authorize attendance, admittance or access to ANY part of the evening’s activities. Even though I informed them of this, they still decided to come.”
The Salahi’s, however, say they have an e-mail chain that can prove otherwise.
It would be a tragedy to see CSM Jones’ stellar record of service to this country blemished because of some limelight seeking wannabes who happened to cross her path on Facebook. Let that be a lesson to all you social networkers out there!
–stanley yorker
