Lawmaker uses racial slur on Showtime
ATLANTA — A Georgia lawmaker was one of 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, yells a racial slur for black people, speaks with a mock Asian accent and defends his failed plan to ban burqas in public.
In a recent broadcast of Cohen’s Showtime series “Who Is America?,” Cohen plays an Israeli military expert and told Republican
Rep. Jason Spencer to take part in what he was told was a counterterrorism video.
Spencer is told to yell racial epithets and shimmy his exposed rear-end toward purported Muslim attackers screaming “USA” and “America.” Cohen told Spencer the performance would ward off terrorists.
The segment aired on July 22 also shows Spencer speaking with a mocking Asian accent while pretending to use a selfie-stick to surreptitiously insert a camera phone under a Muslim woman’s burqa.
The Georgia legislator has been criticized in the past for saying things deemed offensive to blacks and Muslims. But he isn’t the first public figure to be fooled by Cohen in his Showtime series.
Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Arizona sheriff and senate candidate Joe Arpaio have also been duped.
Spencer lost in the May primary but his term doesn’t end until his replacement takes over after the November election. But The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia House Speaker David Ralston has called for Spencer to resign.
“Representative Spencer has disgraced himself and should resign immediately,” Ralson said last week. “Georgia is better than this.”
In a statement following the episode’s airing on July 23, Spencer apologized for the “ridiculously ugly episode” but he refused to step down from office. He also said he thought the techniques in Showtime segment would prevent “what I believed was an inevitable attack.”