Poll: Bad News for GOP, Rep. Barton – 82% Approve of BP’s $20 Bil Victims’ Fund

If it struck you as odd that House Speaker-to-Be John Boehner and other top Republicans went into a full-bore panic over Rep. Joe Barton’s apology to BP on Thursday — normally they’d be high-fivin’ over Barton’s smearing the $20 billion victims’ fund the president brokered with BP as a “shakedown” — the answer may lie in a poll that came out the same day:

The poll’s Thursday release comes as top BP executives testify in front of Congress. At the hearing, Rep. Joe Barton, ranking Republican on the House Energy Committee, defended BP and slammed the White House for insisting that BP place $20 billion in an escrow fund to help compensate those affected by the oil disaster.

“I am ashamed of what happened at the White House yesterday,” said Barton at the hearing. “I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation would be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown. In this case a $20 billion dollar shakedown.”

But according to the poll, Americans disagree with Barton. Eighty-two percent approve of the creating of a fund of billions of dollars to compensate workers and businesses affected by the spill.

The CNN article on the poll offers another example of how the Beltway media outlets are in the bag for Republicans this year. CNN buried the lead, ignoring the fact that Republicans are on the wrong side of this issue by a huge margin — just 18 percent of Americans agree with Rep. Barton and and 115 of his 178 House colleagues who believe the victims’ fund is a bad thing — choosing instead to focus on the finding that approval of Pres. Obama’s performance relative to the crisis had dropped 5 points: “Rise in disapproval of Obama handling of oil spill.” This despite the fact that president’s overall approval remained constant at 50 percent.

“Liberal” media — riiight.