George Clooney got a White House invitation last night. Clooney met with both President Obama and Vice President Biden to discuss the ongoing genocide in Darfur. The Fox News guys are probably hyperventilating right about now. Clooney just got back from a trip to the Sudan-Chad border, where there’s still on-going debate as to his security detail and whether he was traveling officially as a UN Messenger of Peace.

The White House blog has the story up, calling “Eye on Darfur”. Clooney is talking to the press about how Obama will soon appoint a special envoy to Darfur. Honestly, I thought President Bush had already appointed an envoy to Darfur, so, from my perspective, this really isn’t that newsworthy. But it is! Because it involves Clooney and President Obama! Actually, it is interesting – President Obama personally assured Clooney that Darfur would be made a bigger priority in his administration than in the previous administration. The Guardian has more:

Barack Obama to appoint senior Darfur envoy, says campaigner George Clooney. The Hollywood actor hails ‘huge policy step’ on Sudan conflict after conversations with president and Joe Biden.

The Barack administration is preparing to appoint a “full-time, high-level” envoy to address the conflict in Darfur, according to the actor George Clooney, who met the president and Joe Biden in Washington on Monday to lobby them on the issue.

Clooney said Obama and the vice-president had told him the envoy would report directly to the White House, and would be appointed following a foreign policy review currently taking place “at the senior-most levels”. “They assured me, and wanted to assure the rest – whoever else is listening – this is high on their agenda,” he said. “This is a huge policy step for us.”

Clooney has campaigned for several years for greater US activism to end the conflict between rebels and Sudanese authorities in Darfur, which may have claimed 300,000 lives and displaced 2.7 million people, according to United Nations estimates. The international criminal court is due to decide next week whether to issue an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, on war crimes charges.

“This isn’t about needing American dollars. I understand that it’s a very difficult time,” Clooney said after his scheduled meeting with Biden and a separate, impromptu encounter with Obama. “It’s not about needing American troops. It’s about needing what we do best – what we have done best since the start of this country – which is good, robust diplomacy all across the world.”

The actor, who missed Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony for his White House appointment, is a UN messenger for peace, although this did not prevent the UN from revoking his security escort on a visit this month to eastern Chad, where he was touring refugee camps in the company of the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. “If the UN is too craven to protect its own goodwill ambassadors – because they might criticise genocide – it’s not surprising that it and the international community fail to protect hundreds of thousands of voiceless Darfuris,” Kristof wrote.

Elizabeth Alexander, a Biden spokeswoman, said: “The vice-president informed Mr Clooney about the administration’s ongoing review of Sudanese policy and welcomed his observations from his trip, [and] thanked Mr Clooney for his work on this issue, which he believes is an important contribution to the public’s understanding of the conflict in Darfur.”

The actor brought with him to the White House 250,000 postcards signed by Americans urging more US action on Darfur. “I think somehow we should all know that these people are hanging on by the skin of their teeth,” he told CNN.

From The Guardian

I wonder if Clooney’s meeting was just supposed to be with Biden, and Obama just stopped by for a quick grip-and-grin. That’s what it sounds like to me. Even though I doubt Obama really cares about what the hyperventilating right-wing has to say about his relationship to Hollywood, he probably does want to avoid a lot of Hollywood encounters as a general rule. Plus, Clooney takes credit for everything – kind of like Joe Biden, come to think of it. Obama probably already had things covered with the roll-out of his African foreign policy, and Clooney swooped in to announce it. I adore Clooney and Biden, but I bet that meeting was like a war of blabbermouths.

These photos are of Clooney on set in early January and he has since shaved off that mustache.