Did We Elect Borat President?

Something is odd about President Obama. I don’t mean the usual silly political stuff that he’s a crypto-socialist. I mean he is somehow different from any other politician. I think I began to notice something was a little off when he first started campaigning to be president — but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. It was just odd to have everyone so excited about him and no one was sure why. Then there are all the weird mistakes and goofs he’s made, which only seem to keep multiplying since he’s become president. On one side you have people trying to blow those mistakes up to show what a liberal politician he is. On the other side you have people defending all his actions. I think both sides are getting fooled here.

I finally had an epiphany when Obama, reacting to the public outcry on runaway spending, ordered that $100 million in cuts be made from the budget. The $4 trillion budget. With a projected deficit of $1.8 trillion. That’s like suddenly gaining a thousand pounds and trying to offset the weight by trimming one fingernail. If Obama’s people can find $100 million to cut every year, they’ll have the budget balanced in the year 20,009 AD, by which time the human race will probably have flown to distant galaxies in an attempt to escape the massive debt that has consumed their home planet.

So why would Obama propose something so pathetically silly? I haven’t heard anyone defend this one, but the usual explanation that he’s politically tone deaf doesn’t quite cover it. This is beyond tone deaf. There is, in fact, only one rational explanation for it: it’s a joke.

There’s a conspiracy theory out there that because Obama hasn’t released his real birth certificate, that proves he isn’t a natural citizen and is thus not eligible to be president. I was dismissive of that, but now I think it’s true. If we found his real birth certificate, my guess is that it would say that he was born in England and that his name is Sacha Baron Cohen.

That’s right; we elected Borat president.

I’m like 95 percent certain about this; it just fits, the more I think about it. Don’t all the weird gaffes and the strange adoration of Obama make sense if it were all some Borat-type gag? A lot of the humor in Borat’s character is that Cohen presented him as a well-meaning foreigner who gets people to dismiss his eccentricities as cultural differences. He’d keep getting weirder and weirder to see how far he could go before people stopped being polite. He’s doing the same thing with his Bruno character for a movie coming out this summer. With Obama, though, he’s using a bit of a different approach. We had all these people (probably actors — at least in the beginning) loving him for no apparent reason and declaring to us what a smart person this new politician Obama was. Thus, everyone thought all his weirdness was just what a smart, new type of politician was like.

And Cohen got away with some weird stuff in his comedy bits in just the campaign. Like trashing voters as bitter clingers to religion when he allegedly thought the media wasn’t listening. Then there were his crazy friends (also actors) like the terrorist Ayers and the paranoid racist preacher Wright. Come on, a presidential candidate who is friends with a terrorist? That’s pretty funny when you think about it. And remember in the Borat movie when Cohen was in an antique shop and kept falling over and over breaking things? Obama basically did the same bit with his comically bad bowling game where he played worse than a four-year-old, except no one caught on and threw him out of there.

In fact, no one seemed to catch on at all during the campaign, and now he’s gotten elected president and keeps trying even wackier stunts. Bowing to the Saudi king, giving a DVD set he bought at Costco to a foreign leader, giving an iPod to the queen of England — they’re all obvious comedy bits. And then there’s his budget. Like every month he throws another trillion on it to see how far he can go before we figure out it’s all a gag.

Or if.

It’s coming. A movie will come out called Barack Obama: President of America for Make Benefit Change and Hope of World, and if there is no inkling we were in on the joke, we’re going to be the laughing stocks of the entire world. America will never be able to show its face again on the international stage.

That’s why both those defending Obama and those railing against his politics are wrongheaded. Because they’re both taking him seriously and are going to look like fools in the end. We have to put a stop to this and face the fact the Obama administration is just a big, mean (though quite clever) gag. At the next White House press conference, the press needs to stand up and say to the president, “We know it’s really you, Sacha Baron Cohen. Not cool!” Then they need to walk out. Otherwise, we’re all going to look stupid.