Netanyahu in Congress, 2011
Netanyahu in Congress, 2011Flash 90

A New York Times report Tuesday compares demand for tickets to Binyamin Netanyahu's speech before the joint houses of Congress Tuesday to that of a top-class musical concert.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told the newspaper the only ticket more in demand than a seat inside the House chamber for Netanyahu’s address would be “if it was [country music star] Garth Brooks — maybe.”

“If I had 100 tickets, I’d be the most popular guy in town,” he said.

By pressuring Netanyahu to call of the speech and encouraging a boycott of it, the White House and leading Democrats only called more attention to it, he opined. “They have made it the most talked about thing in Washington, and I think it blew up in their face,” Graham added. “Everything he says, people want to hear, and people want to be in that room to listen, they want to be in person. It’s become a historic speech.”

“The tickets are hotter than fresh latkes,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer (D-NY).

According to the Times' Ashley Parker, House Speaker John Boehner’s office said it had received requests for “10 times as many tickets as there are available seats in the gallery," and both the House and the Senate have set up alternate viewing locations that will also require tickets.

“If Taylor Swift and Katy Perry did a joint concert at Madison Square Garden wearing white-and-gold and black-and-blue dresses, accompanied by dancing sharks and llamas, that’s the only way you’d have a tougher ticket,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner.

Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, said, “If I was solely responsible for filling the gallery, it would have been filled up in a New York minute.”

“I have people all day, every day, contacting me as if there’s a hundred thousand seats just vacant,” he said. “It’s a historic time for Israel, for America, for the stability of the Middle East, and I think that people see that historic moment on March 3 and want to be part of it,” he told the Times.

The newspaper added that even Democrats “are hanging on to their tickets, distributing them as if they were a form of valuable currency.”