Is it remotely possible that the 2012 presidential election will be decided by an eight-foot-tall, bright yellow bird?

I know it sounds ridiculous. But the liberal cognoscenti in this country are going absolutely gaga over Mitt Romney’s promise during last week’s presidential debate that he would end government funding of the Public Broadcasting System. Oh, the horror of it! Imagine: no more “Sesame Street” to entertain the little tykes.

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien said, “... my son was devastated when he heard that Big Bird might be killed.” And where did he get such an absurd idea? By any chance, was it from his momma?

The Barack Obama campaign was quick to seize on what it perceived as a major Republican gaffe. Within hours, it had a new commercial on the air with a narrator using his most menacing voice to warn, “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’s remarks followed one of the most powerful points he made in the debate. He said that when he is president, he will use a very simple test to determine which government programs should be allowed to continue: “Is the program so critical it’s worth borrowing money from China to pay for it?”

And then he said, in what appeared to be a spontaneous ad-lib but was probably carefully rehearsed: “I’m sorry, Jim [Lehrer], I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS.”

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Chip Wood (photo) was the first news editor of The Review of the News and also wrote for American Opinion, our two predecessor publications. He is now the geopolitical editor of Personal Liberty Digest, where his Straight Talk column appears weekly.