Image: White House gatecrashers get gossip award

The Virginia couple who gate crashed US President Barack Obama's State Dinner in honour of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been named as the persons of the year by a gossip columnist of The Washington Post.

'Heck, the only way Tareeq and Michaele Salahi could have missed being our Persons of the Year was if we'd made them Persons of the Decade instead,' wrote the columnist.

The column declared Salahis 'The Reliable Source Persons of the Year'. The Reliable Source is a weekly gossip column of the daily from Washington.

'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,' the column 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,' it said.

Early this week, the White House officially closed the case of gate crashing incident, which has brought instant "infamous" celebrity status to the Salahis.

They refused to appear before a Congressional committee early this month following which they have now been subpoenaed for appearance before the House Committee on Homeland Security on January 20.

Photo courtesy: White House