Poached Bird

[Ubiquitous]

"Sesame Workshop is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not
endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns," the
corporation behind "Sesame Street" writes in response to a new Obama TV
spot. "We have approved no campaign ads, and as is our general practice,
have requested that the ad be taken down."

So Andrea Mitchell isn't the only puppet to have her likeness used
without permission by the campaign. The ad, which you can see at
National Review Online, is quite a piece of work. Here's the script:

Obama: I'm Barack Obama and I approved this message:

Narrator: Bernie Madoff. Ken Lay. Dennis Kozlowski. Criminals.
Gluttons of greed. And the evil genius who towered over them?
One man has the guts to speak his name.

Mitt Romney: Big Bird. Big Bird. Big Bird.

Big Bird: It's me, Big Bird.

Narrator: Big. Yellow. A menace to our economy. Mitt Romney
knows it's not Wall Street you have to worry about. It's
Sesame Street.

Romney: I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS.

Narrator: Mitt Romney, taking on our enemies no matter where
they nest.

Where does one begin toting up the bizarre aspects of this ad? For one
thing, Madoff, Lay and Kozlowski are criminals, but they are not
"enemies." (An example of enemies would be the terrorists who killed the
U.S. ambassador to Libya, which the Obama administration blamed on a
video.) Kozlowski and Lay were both convicted during the Bush
administration; Lay has been dead for more than six years.

Romney never described Big Bird as an evil genius or an enemy or a
menace; his actual quote from last week's debate was "I love Big Bird."
He just sees no reason why "Sesame Street" should benefit from corporate
welfare. Maybe the Obama ad will appeal to 5-year-olds--and with judges
in several states having issued injunctions against voter-fraud
measures, maybe some of them will cast ballots for the president--but to
our mind it calls into question whether Obama can even be taken
seriously.

And it's not as if the Big Bird ad is just some lark. It's part of the
Obama campaign's "comeback" plan, the New York Times reported yesterday:

On the conference call convened by aides in Denver and Chicago
even as the candidates were still on stage, there was no debate
in the Obama campaign about the debate. None of the advisers
fooled themselves into thinking it was anything but a disaster.
Instead, they scrambled for ways to recover. They resolved to
go after Mr. Romney with a post-debate assault on his
truthfulness. Ad makers were ordered to work all night to
produce an attack ad. And they would seize on Mr. Romney's
vow to cut financing for Big Bird.

"You have to scratch your head when the president spends the last week
talking about saving Big Bird," Politico quotes Romney as saying. "I
actually think we need to have a president who talks about saving the
American people and saving good jobs."

If the Romney campaign wants to match Obama's level of seriousness, it
could cut an ad with Clint Eastwood interviewing an empty nest.

--
"Re-electing Obama is like backing The Titanic up and hitting the
iceberg a second time."

[jmfabi...@gmail.com]

I remember seeing episodes with Big Bird's cousin Poached Bird! Thanks for the info!!!!