I’ve never been a big fan of birds.  As a matter of fact, I find them kind of creepy.

It didn’t help that as a child I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” on Bob Wilkins’ “Creature Features.” It was a local program we watched to freak ourselves out.  The three movies that stand out in my mind as particularly frightening were “Psycho,” “The Bride of Frankenstein,” and “The Birds.”

Of course, I lived in Northern California and the locations in “The Birds” were familiar to me.  You’d think that having been to those places would make it less frightening, I mean, I was never attacked by birds when I was there.  But for some reason it made it more frightening.  I found myself shying away from contact with birds, and when they gathered anywhere it freaked me out

It didn’t help that we were regularly dive bombed by seagulls while trying to eat lunch at my middle school.  I could never figure out why there’d be hundreds of seagulls hanging around our school, which was 80 miles away from the ocean.  I guess they had a hankering for our usual diet of corn dogs, Cheetos, and chocolate milk.  (I know, Michelle Obama would have had a fit, but for some reason we were all thin in those days  We probably got a lot of exercise running away from the birds.)

As usual, I digress.  It just occurred to me that this obsession that the Obama campaign has with Big Bird is a bit much.  For one thing, it’s absolutely ridiculous that the tax payers are subsidizing Sesame Street.  My son watched it when he was young, so I know a bit about how many Sesame Street products are out there, and that they aren’t cheap.  Fortunately, my son’s fondness was short lived and confined to Elmo, (because, let’s face it, he’s really cute). and the Cookie Monster, (because he represented a career that my now 14 year old is still working towards).

I was never a huge fan of the show because my son didn’t really like it.  He wasn’t a particularly difficult child so he’d happily sit down and watch a half hour program.  However, he preferred Blue’s Clues because it was more fun and interactive.  Sesame Street’s harping on a particular letter left him cold, he didn’t particularly care about the letter “C” unless there was an “ookie” attached and he had an actual cookie in his hand.   The amazing thing is that now he’s an excellent speller, go figure….

Sesame Street is one of those programs that tries to “program” our kids, but fortunately most kids outgrow it quickly and turn to other programs to program them.  Frankly, I think the only reason Sesame Street is as successful as it is is because parents think it’s “the” program for their kids to watch, when most of the kids I observed seemed bored with it.  They much preferred the flashier and more fun programming on the Disney Channel.

So when Mitt Romney mentioned during the debate that he liked Big Bird but that he still wanted to defund PBS, I cheered.  It’s about time that programs like Sesame Street support themselves.  They’re obviously well able to do it, so why should we?

The fact that the Obama campaign had nothing else to pin his faltering reelection hopes on than an off hand mention of Big Bird is emblematic of the emptiness of Obama himself.  I’ve always referred to him as an “empty suit” and couldn’t understand that people actually thought he was smart.  He never struck me as particularly intelligent and was the classic example of what Leftists always do.  They try to convince you that they’re smarter than you are and therefore need to be given all the power.  Huh?  I think being a Leftie proves that they aren’t very smart to begin with, there’s no need for debate.  Besides they’re incapable of honest debate.  They have two tactics, attack, and blame.

When Romney cleaned Obama’s clock in the debate last Tuesday, Obama supporters had no where to go except to make lame excuses by blaming the moderator, the altitude, the format, anything they could think of to distract the public from Obama’s disastrous performance.  The only thing they could attack was Romney’s “attack” on Big Bird.  It was all they had.

So, they played it up and even made an ad about it.  Of course, it backfired when Sesame Street Workshop asked them to take it off the air.  I mean really, how pathetic is that?  Told to take an ad off the air because an oversized puppet is afraid to be associated with you?

Of course tomorrow Joe Biden is going to ride in to save the day and wipe the floor with Paul Ryan.  Yeah, really….