Big Bird, Big Government

Working the graveyard shift is a mixed blessing. I'm sorry I missed out on the entertaining live-blogging of the debate, but I did have an opportunity to not only hear the debate, but to read some of the post-debate dissection of the debate...

Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Sesame Front. The forces of Republicanism in 2012 have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the war against PBS is within measurable distance of its end.

The general consensus among media types is that Mitt Romney "won" the first debate in the 2012 campaign, but my takeaway is that his victory will turn out to be a Pyrrhic one.

Mitt never really delivered any telling blows against President Obama in this general snoozefest of a debate. Mitt avoided talking about specific points in his tax plan. Indeed, he avoided specificity on most topics. The fact checkers will be parsing the debate performances of both candidates, while the public spaces out about the facts and figures. Romney's "victory" was due to a largely passive performance on the part of the president... hopefully this was a rope-a-dope tactic on the president's part, a gambit to make Mitt underestimate him before landing some devastating blows during the foreign policy portion of the debates.

Now, for the main reason why I think that Mitt's vague "victory" was a hollow one- the one feature of Romney's performance that will capture the imagination of wags was his declaration of love for Big Bird (who is just the right height), though said love would best be described as creepy and stalkerish, seeing that Mitt wants to cut funding for PBS, the "home" of Big Bird. Already, the meme-generators are hard at work generating facetious images of Mitt. Some of these images are pretty damn devastating. Who the hell is going to remember Mitt's evasive generalizations about his fiscal policies once the social media wags start pushing the Big Bird narrative?

Poor Mitt, he may have won a doubleplusgood victory against Barack Obama in debate round one, but he lost the meme war against Big Bird. It won't be long before one of Mitt's team members tells Wolf Blitzer, "We have always been at war with Sesame Street."