Hey everyone, I’ve been reading about several politicians (mostly) Republicans who’ve been manipulated by Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat, Ali G, etc) into making fools of themselves on camera, The latest victim is a legislator from Georgia, who allegedly mooned the camera, and shouted expletives and racial slurs, egged on by Cohen in a disguise:
ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia lawmaker is the latest public figure caught with his pants down on provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen’s new cable TV series, this time literally, as the state legislator exposes his bottom, speaks with a mock Asian accent and yells a racial slur all in the name of fighting terrorism.
In Sunday night’s broadcast of Cohen’s Showtime series “Who Is America?” Cohen poses as an Israeli military expert who persuades Republican Rep. Jason Spencer to take part in several outlandish exercises. The lawmaker is told they’re making a counterterrorism video.
My question is, how stupid are these politicians to allow themselves to be recorded doing these asinine stunts? I realize they want airtime but this just seems so blatantly stupid. Other victims are Sarah Palin, Joe Arpaio, etc., who stated they were tricked into acting foolish and at least Sarah Palin threatened legal action.
I do a lot of work in scissor and boom lifts. Sometimes, it takes more than one person to do whatever it is, so someone else will get in the basket with me, we’ll go up and take care of our task and move on to the next one, etc.
For some reason a shocking number of people have decided that once we’re in the air and isolated, they’re gonna tell me just what they think about black people or Mexicans or Jews or women… Just a couple of weeks ago I had a lady tell me on the way to our ballroom, alone in a long hallway, “Have you noticed how lazy all the black people are? I mean, the ones we have to work with?” I cut her off, told her to stuff it and altered my pace. Thirty minutes later she starts in on me while we’re working with “So you know, I’m not racist-” I cut her off “Yes; you are. Now stop trying to talk to me about this.”
When I tell others, most are shocked. “So-and-so? Are you kidding?” No; I wouldn’t kid about this.
It is astounding what people will do when they think they are among likeminded folk.
His explicit excuse for his behavior in that video is that he thought it was actual anti-terrorism tactics for an actual anti-terrorism video, and that Baron Cohen was playing on his fears.
Uh, no shit, dude. That’s the joke–that you’re so bugshit paranoid about Muslims, and so racist, and so credulous, and so stupid, that you’d literally show your ass on camera rather than question your underlying assumptions.
Showing politicians up as gullible twits has an established history, at least over here, and is a public service, after all. Sometimes the sting doesn’t particularly work, and shows up the prankster more than their victim. But it did once (not one of Cohen’s) get as far as persuading sundry people in the public eye to speak out against a new drug called “cake”, even getting an MP to put down a formal question to ministers about it.
