Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin ran to Fox News to explain that, despite his best efforts to throw down in the middle of a Senate hearing, “political correctness” is what stopped him from beating up a witness.
On Tuesday, Mullin stood up during a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee and made a move to physically fight Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, a witness before the committee with whom he’s been feuding for months.
Mullin has been going on a media tour in the wake of the near-altercation. During an interview with Sean Hannity, the Fox News host reminisced to Mullin about his rough and tumble youth. “I don’t think there was a single day that we were playing sports where we didn’t drop the gloves or, you know, have a brief interlude of, you know, throwing fists and it would be all be over,” Hannity said, asking Mullin when society had become so “woke” that fist-fights are no longer an acceptable solution to conflict.
Mullin agreed, telling Hannity that “it’s political correctness.”
“All of a sudden you got to worry about somebody’s feelings but oh, by the way, the left can say whatever they want,” the senator added.
The senator added that if he hadn’t challenged O’Brien to a fist-fight in the middle of his workday “the people of Oklahoma would have been pretty upset” with him.
In another interview Mullin gave on Tuesday to the Undaunted Life podcast the Senator said, unprompted, that he’s “not afraid of biting” his opponent in a fight.
“I will bite,” he said, “100 percent, in a fight I’m gonna bite. I’ll do anything, I’m not above it. And I don’t care where I bite, by the way, it’s just gonna be a bite.”
Mullin claimed that his feud with O’Brien was “not personal” and that he wasn’t actually “mad at this guy.” But anyone who saw the video of Mullin losing it on Tuesday would venture to say that he was, in fact, mad.