“Wall Street can run wild again, but he’s bringing the hammer down on Sesame Street,” joked President Obama last Thursday after the first presidential debate. When presidential nominee Mitt Romney spoke of cutting funding to PBS, the twitter world exploded with tweets related to Big Bird. Even mock twitter accounts were made such as FiredBigBird.
Mitt Romney’s exact words were “I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to — I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.” These remarks sparked thousands of tweets from all sorts of people. Astrophysicist and host of PBS program NOVA scienceNOW, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted “Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive.”
Big Bird himself appeared on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update to talk about what happened. He stayed neutral when it came to politics, but when asked how he heard the news, and whether or not he was on twitter, he replied “No, I’m a bird, tweeting is how we talk.” It seems that everyone, even high school students were taking a stand for or against Big Bird. Adam Dodson, a senior at Bob Jones High School and a Conservative Republican said, “I think it was good for what he was trying to advocate, for just wasteful government spending, but the humor part of it was a bit ill-conceived because, it made him look like a jerk.”
