Phil Mudd on CNN's New Day is all of us, expressing our outrage at Rep. Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer's unauthorized trip to the Kabul airport on Tuesday.
Moulton and Meijer took a commercial flight to the Middle East, and from there managed to get to the Kabul airport at a time where the U.S. military, diplomatic corps and others are working 25 hours a day to get as many people OUT of Kabul as possible. Which means that as soon as they set foot in Afghanistan, both of them took attention and resources away from the mission at hand to make sure two camera-ready elected officials with no authorization didn't get kidnapped or used as bait for the Taliban or ISIS-K.
“Two members of Congress, without the support of their leadership, decide that they’re going to bypass Disneyland and take an Instagram trip to Afghanistan because they want some eye candy for a bunch of constituents,” said Mudd, accurately describing the scope and purpose of their trip.
“If I were Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy I would see this as a chance for bipartisanship, both those guys on their committees: out. Done,” Mudd ranted. “And by the way, ask them for the two seats they took out, for all their concerns about refugees, what happens to the two refugees who didn’t get those seats, what do you tell them?”
According to the two representatives, they used flight crew seats so they wouldn't take away any space from the refugees, though one might wonder whether those 2 crew seats might still have been given to refugees. In fact, they were unapologetic about what they did. “We have been on the other side of this argument while we were serving and it just isn’t accurate,” Moulton and Meijer told The Washington Post. “Trust us: the professionals on the ground are focused on the mission. Many thanked us for coming.”
If that's not a Trumpy justification, I'm not sure what is. Many thanked them? Was that while they were distracting the "many" from the task at hand, or just in their own minds?
Phil Mudd scoffed at their claim. “Last thing I’d say evidently for what I’ve read, one of the brilliant insights they’ve gotten is that the slow start meant that we could get fewer people out than we would have gotten out if we started fast. Look, John, I can do oversight from Memphis and give you that. Reprehensible, they ought to go from their committees.”
Damn right they should, but I predict they won't. For me, it's just another reminder that Seth Moulton is a grandstanding attention seeker who isn't as focused on the job as the glory.
