While the exchange of five Taliban detainees for Army Sgt. Bowe
Bergdahl is unpopular with a plurality of Americans, Republicans were
more likely than Democrats to disapprove of the deal, according to two
polls released this week.
A poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center and USA Today found that 43 percent of Americans overall said the Obama administration did the wrong thing in trading Taliban prisoners for the detained U.S. soldier while 23 percent said the deal was the right decision to make.
Republicans were overwhelmingly negative about the prisoner swap, with 71 percent responding that the exchange was the wrong thing to do, according to the poll. By contrast, 55 percent of Democrats said the swap was the right thing to do.
The poll also found a partisan divide among respondents who thought the U.S. was responsible for securing a captive soldier’s release, no matter the circumstances. Seventy-five percent of Democrats versus just 39 percent of Republicans said the U.S. was obligated to do all it could to secure a captive’s freedom.
Forty-eight percent of Republicans also answered that the U.S. was not obligated to do all it could to secure Bergdahl’s freedom because he left his post, compared to 16 percent of Democrats who shared that opinion. Those figures reflect some doubts on the Bergdahl prisoner exchange in particular.
A CBS News poll released Tuesday found 45 percent of Americans disapprove of the Bergdahl deal, with opinion splitting similarly down party lines. Most Republicans and independents disapproved of the prisoner exchange while just over half of Democrats approved.
Still, 56 percent of Americans said the U.S. paid too high a price to secure Bergdahl’s freedom, according to the CBS poll.
Republicans take “poisoning the well” to a whole other level. I expected a polling result like this, in part because of the effectiveness of the Republican smear machine. But also, because I’ve lost any hope that the majority of the American public can engage in any type of thinking more complicated than that required to operate a T.V. remote.
Proof that voters can’t think for themselves.
Proving once again that Republicans are so completely around the bend that they truly believe that when this president exercises presidential power in the exact same way that his predecessors did, its an impeachable offense.
You could have just stopped the headline with “Polls: Americans divided along party lines.”
A country is not conquered from without until it is conquered from within. We will ultimately fall because of this division. It’s how every great nation has fallen in the past, and we seem to be speeding toward the inevitable same demise.
Ahh such is the power of Fox Noise and Clear Channel Radio over Republicans.