Flipping the Big Bird

It’s October, and the weather has started to finally cool off here in the desert Southwest.  The evenings are pleasant again, and the mornings are cool and dry and perfectly luscious.  With the start of each day, we get to savor the decline and fall of another endless summer.   It is a time of great rejoicing, and a general sense of giddy relief floods over the land… 

I have been very busy working outside this last week or so.  Every year around this time, I get very enthused about the idea of starting a winter garden, and so I have set about my annual ritual of clearing our garden space of all the dead branches and discarded junk that tends to collect there over the summer.  Unfortunately, this has caused me to fall woefully behind on my writing schedule.  So, to keep things moving along here at thunderstrokes, I have invited a prominent writer acquaintance of mine to contribute a post.

Mr. Clive Cumberbun is the executive director of the Center of American Values for America’s Americans, a conservative think-tank based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  While he was unwilling to provide me with an original piece of content (only because of an absolutely brutal polo schedule, according to his email), he did give me exclusive permission to post an item he recently wrote for the Center’s official newsletter, "The Rabid Pachyderm."  Gee, I hope they aren’t riding rabid pachyderms while they play polo…

Enjoy.  I’m going back outside.     

Reprinted with the author’s permission from The Rabid Pachyderm, originally published 10.08.12 

By Clive Cumberbun

In the aftermath of the first presidential debate, Mr. Romney has taken a great deal of undeserved political flak for daring to suggest that PBS and shows like Sesame Street be kicked off the public coffers.  While his position seemed to surprise much of the viewing audience, those of us who have been following this election cycle know that Mr. Romney has been quite vocal on this issue since the primaries began.  For example, in March Mr. Romney appeared on Sean Hannity’s show, trying to alert the American people to the critical problem represented by public television: 

We’re going to have to stop some things we also like.  I mean, I like PBS, for instance. I like my grandkids being able to see Bert and Ernie and Big Bird, but I’m not willing to borrow money from China so that PBS doesn’t have to run advertising.

For nearly a year, Mr. Romney has been remarkably consistent when it comes to cutting funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for both NPR radio as well as PBS.  Thus it earns the distinction of being one of his most enduring, if not endearing, political beliefs (his other, ‘I believe in baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, but not Chevrolet,’ goes all the way back to 2009).