Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Thursday June 13th 2019.

I am John Putthorz the editor of commentary the 70-odd year-old monthly of intellectual analysis,

political, probity, and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective.

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Abe Greenwald Hy-Abe. Hy-John, associate editor no Rothman Hy-Noah, Hy-John, and in Washington

senior writer Christine Rosen, Hy-Christine. Hy-John. So guys we have a lot of different things going

on and I don't think we have a central focus today so we have this incident in the Gulf of Oman

where two again two carriers to tankers were hit by shells and in an extraordinary tweet explaining

what might have gone on here. The Washington Posts, they root correspondent one Liz Slye put it

now I have to find I said it and said the following quote big escalation in the Persian Gulf

two oil tankers struck him on fire, focus of US Iran tensions comes after Trump failed to heed

the last tanker warning and imposed more sanctions. In other words it's Trump's fault that he didn't

heed the last warning from Iran or Iranian assets and drop all the sanctions that he's put on Iran.

So basically it's on Trump that what we can only assume is Iran fired on

conventional non-military ships carrying oil I think to the far east.

So this was a pretty extraordinary way of putting it but interesting because I think it captures

what would be the general anti-Trump anti-ratcheting up pressure against Iran view which is somehow

that if anything is going wrong it's Trump's fault. Noah? Yeah I generally agree with that framing.

There's no other way to sort of get into the mind of where Liz was coming from there because it doesn't

doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So I wrote when this when the last attack happened by the way

...