Big Bird

After the President's abysmal performance in this week's debate, Obama supporters and their media extensions are only too happy to change the subject. Hence, the heavy media coverage of the ridiculous suggestion (joke?) by the President that Romney wants to balance the budget on the back of Big Bird. After adding almost 5 trillion dollars in debt over the past four years, Barack Obama could liquidate the assets of PBS and every other media outlet in the United States and still not come close to erasing the debt he has created.

Under this President, the media in general has become an extension of the government. It does little to question the President's actions, his statements, or his record. It's as if CNN, and the other alphabet networks are channeling Pravda (from the old Soviet Union) by avoiding news that might hurt the current leader altogether, or soft-pedaling treatment of it by relegating it to a brief mention. And like Pravda, any challenger to the existing power structure is denigrated mercilessly by the supposedly independent media. That's bad enough, so there's absolutely no reason for the feds to continue even partial funding for still another media outlet, in this case PBS.

PBS is a fine network with some excellent programming. It should be able to support itself or, if that is not possible, migrate its programming to other networks that can. But government funding of PBS is an artifact of another era—a time when there were only 6 or 7 channels on your TV "dial," and none of them provided equivalent programming to Sesame Street, Nova, high-brow dramas, interview shows, and the like. Today, there are literally hundreds of channels to choose from, some dedicated to children's programming (NickJr), others to science (the Science channel), the world (NatGeo), excellent dramas of all kinds (HBO), and current events (ahem, CNN?). None of these receive government funding and all of them proper.

This is what Romney said during the debate: “I like PBS. I love Big Bird, but I’m not going to … to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.”

Only a fool would suggest that when Mitt Romney stated that he'd cut federal funding for PBS, he was trying to balance the budget or cut our debt. The money involved is a blip on the balance sheet. Romney's statement was a symbol of the need to pare down unnecessary government expenditures. But Obama's (joking?) reference to Big Bird is representative of his big government philosophy. This president never saw a government expenditure that couldn't be increased, unless that expenditure was despised by his supporters. In the end, defending government funding on Big Bird tells us everything we need to know about Barack Obama's promises to reduce the deficit.