It shouldn't matter because party affiliation should never play into how we treat POW's and their families. But it does now. It has been the Republicans and the FOX Nutwork, Rightwing radio and Rightwing rags that have spent the entire week maligning Bob Bergdahl, Bowe Bergdahl and his family because they think it will negatively affect President Obama. Bob Bergdahl appears to be a Republican, according to this just released article appearing in The Daily Beast..
This is where all the slandering and libeling and defiling of the Bergdahl's by Republicans comes back to bite them in their hypocritical asses. I can't help but wonder what Bob Bergdahl and his family think about the Republicans now.
From The Daily Beast:
In a 2010 speech, Robert Bergdahl claimed that the man who held Bowe “recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike.” The reports at the time appear to back him up.
In June 2010, Robert Bergdahl, the father of released American POW Bowe Bergdahl, gave a speech at an Idaho Republican Party fundraiser. In one of his first public appearances during his son's five-year captivity, he asked the conservative audience to show compassion for his son's captors—and, in a twist that foretold the plot of Homeland—he alleged that the United States had killed one of those captor's children with a drone strike
Further…
The Idaho fundraiser was an election year event, and the day's other speakers—Idaho Senator Jim Risch, then-national-party-chairman Michael Steele, radio host Dennis Prager, and a belligerent stand-up comic named Eric Golub—took the usual shots at President Obama and rallied partisans to donate money to November's cause. [I covered the event as a reporter for AOL News.]
"There are many things that can hurt America," Senator Risch said. "Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, the Taliban—they can all hurt us. But they can't destroy us. This [Obama] Administration can destroy us."
It was four years before Bob and Jani Bergdahl would know that their son's imagined execution would not be videotaped for Taliban propaganda. The traditional symbols of MIA-POW remembrance were laid out before the speakers' podium—an empty table set for one with a white cloth, a red rose in a vase tied with a yellow ribbon—and Bergdahl began by explaining why he was at a political event at all.
"I grew up in a conservative family in Los Angeles," he said with a smile. "My father was for Goldwater. He wore a Nixon button in our liberal Jewish neighborhood. I was the lone U.C. Santa Barbara surfer who voted for Ronald Reagan." Many in the audience nodded in approval, and then Bergdahl talked about the work of retrieving his son
To read the entire article:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
And then we have the FOX Nutwork attacking Bob Bergdahl as being a Taliban sympathizer and exercising their bigotry... fallaciously declaring that Bergdahl is a Moslem (when in actuality he's Christian) and inferring there's something wrong with that: