President Barack Obama had a semi-secret meeting with former Soviet Presidet Mikhail Gorbachev, apparently as preparation for further engagement with the Russians. Reasonable! (We sent Henry Kissinger over there recently in a similar capacity). But the meeting wasn't officially announced, and you know that Robert Gibbs secretly enjoyed telling reporters the following:
The president tends to roam around the larger (White) House and sometimes walks into meetings that weren't previously on his schedule.
I thought that sort of transparent flim-flammery was the province of a show like "West Wing," but apparently they really do it. One hopes that Obama and Gorby engaged in a kind of elaborate pantomime when they "accidentally" met, telling each other how surprised they were by the other's coincidental presence.
-- Tim Fernholz
