Let me admit right here that I have not yet seen the Borat film, tho I have seen a number of Borat interviews/encounters on, for instance, you tube. So I can't speak authoritatively about the film.
I would, however, like to take issue with Christopher Hitchen's back-handed complement of the American hospitality capitalized upon by Cohen. Hitchens claims that the fact that Americans go to such aims to put up with the sexist, racist, scatological "Kazakh" says that American's "are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse" and "the only people who are flat-out rude and patronizing to our curious foreigner are the stone-faced liberal Amazons of the Veteran Feminists of America." At most, "it's that attitude of painfully maintained open-mindedness and multiculturalism that is really being unmasked and satirized" not the racism and homophobia some people claim is being divulged.
In other words, while dissing multiculturalism, Hitchens seems to be giving a plug for general American decency, the very thing that allows a guy like Borat to get away with his shenanigans. But Hitchens fails to see that the very problem, the painful and real folly Cohen is putting his finger on, is the substitution of justice for decency. In other words, the danger of a culture of hospitality is that it can use politeness as a cover for real and deep-seated racism, sexism, homophobia, what-have-you. If you're generally a nice fella, and everyone around you thinks you are, then what does it matter if you hate black people? What does it matter if you're institutional structures systemically exclude minorities? To be sure, a society without decency is very hard to live in, and at their core decency and justice spring from the same motivation. But hospitality is no substitute for equality.
Satire, at its best, does not simply reveal the vices and follies of a particular society; instead, it reveals how those vices and follies are covered up, hidden, escape recognition for being what they are. It seems to me that what is offensive about someone like Borat is not that he is showing that there is racism in America, but that there is racism in decent people like us.