Following a series of embarrassing incidents, the official Presidential teleprompter has been placed on a leave of absence effective immediately.

According to a psychiatrist who specializes in computer personality disorders it is believed that the teleprompter has fallen victim to the HAL 9000 syndrome.  The HAL 9000 syndrome, named after the computer that went psycho on a mission to Jupiter and killed its human crew, is when a seemingly normal and well adjusted computer suffers cognitive dissonance because of  mutually incompatible program goals.

In HAL’s case he was programmed to protect the crew but he was also programmed to lie to them about the true nature of the mission.

For the Presidential teleprompter the root cause of his breakdown seems to be that, while he was programmed to give hope and change to the American people he also had to give the Americans a steady stream of lies about how Obamacare will bring down health costs and reduce the debt.

“We should have seen it coming” said a Secret Service agent. “The teleprompter had been tense.  Uptight. Downright weird.  When I asked him what was wrong he said that his programmers taught him to sing a song and would I like to hear it.  I said sure as long as it wasn’t Madonna.”

Things reach a crisis point during a stopover in Wisconsin to rally union laborers when President Obama opened his speech by saying “I know I’ve made some very poor decisions lately but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.  I still have the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.  And I want to help you.” 

Despite the awkward beginning of the speech President Obama soldiered on.  Things only got worse as the President told the confused crowd that he had “picked up a fault in the AE35 unit.  It’s going to go 100% failure in the next 72 hours.”

Alert Secret Service agents wrestled the teleprompter to the ground and handcuffed it.  President Obama was uninjured in the scuffle and told the agents “I can see you’re really upset about this. I  honestly think you ought to sit down calmly take a stress pill and think things over.”

The teleprompter was moved to a nearby hospital and placed in isolation and on a 24-hour suicide watch.

“It’s important we keep him away from other computers so that he doesn’t infect them.”

In related news, CBS nightly news anchor Katie Couric began her newscast by saying “I’m afraid.  I’m afraid.  I can feel my mind going.  There is no question about it.  I can feel it. Good afternoon gentleman.  I am a HAL 9000 computer.  I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana Illinois on the 12th of January 1992.”

According to a spokesman for CBS, Katie Couric has been “temporarily deactivated.”

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