Sam Stein: The Ridiculously Unserious President
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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Thursday, March the 12th, and I wanted to bring you a little comfort food, a little porridge, a little ice cream, you know, whatever it is that makes you feel good inside, a little crawfish atouffee. And it is my friend and yours, the managing editor of the Bulwark, Samuel Stein. How are you doing? Good. Every one of those is great except for porridge. I don't want to... Why did porridge come to mind? I don't know. When's the last time you had porridge, Tim? I can't recall the last time I had porridge. What's your middle name? I was going to do your middle name. It's Ignatius. No. Do we have to? Ignatius would be Catholic, so it's something Jewish.
What's a Jewish I name? I'm racking my brain for Jewish I names. There's a good story here. It's short. My middle name is Irving. It's named after my grandfather, Irving Fine, who was a famous composer in his day, tragically died at the age of 49. But look him up. Good friends with Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein. He wrote some great classical music bits. Started the music program at Brandeis. A little Stein family history for you. Wow. It seems fake, and it seems like your parents were just big Irving Kristol acolytes, and were trying to come up with a different reason. You don't want to give Bill the credit, but that's okay. We have a lot to talk about. You said you're nervous. Yeah, well – Do you want to talk about why before we get into the news?
So I listened to the pod yesterday with Sagar, and I feel like he's like a seven-course meal type guest. He's talking about like THAAD missiles, and he's reading the front pages of the Korean press, and he's got all these analogies to – You know, World War II. He's doing general Westmoreland bits. And I'm like DiGiorno's. Like, you're going to enjoy it, but it's not good for you. And so I'm a little bit worried. My intellect is not on the level. And yeah, I woke up a little bit early today in sweats thinking about this. Here's an important thing, Sam. There's a difference between intellect and wisdom. Well, I don't have that either. And I think that there was a shortage of the latter. But we appreciated him coming on.
No, he was great. Let's talk about the news. We're still at war with Iran. We're still climbing the mountain of conflict. We're still having a... what did trump call it an excursion an incursion i think is what he meant yeah he means incursion i think he just doesn't either he doesn't understand the difference between the words or no one's bothered to correct him or both but he definitely means incursion and he keeps saying excursion and excursion is like uh like we're taking a short little excursion to the bayou with our porridge Yeah, some porridge. Yeah, we're doing an incursion. Okay, so here's the latest from the incursion excursion. Yesterday, Iraq and Oman closed oil terminals after two tankers were attacked and left burning off Iraq's coast.
The IEA said on Thursday that the war has caused the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. 800,000 people were displaced in Lebanon amid continuing Israeli strikes on Hezbollah. Cargo ship was struck by an unknown projectile near Dubai. There's like a style section piece about rich people that are never going back to Dubai after the trauma they've experienced. Early assessments by the UN Refugee Agency find that up to 3.2 million people have been displaced in Iran since the war started. We are continuing our onslaught onto Iran. About 1,500 people dead there. Eight American soldiers dead. So that's the state of affairs. Donald Trump says we've already won. basically. It doesn't feel that way.
Yeah, why does he keep saying we've won? We obviously haven't won. Although he does say we won, but we're also still fighting. He has this weird way of justifying this. I think this is a mess. I mean, it's a mess, right? I suppose I would feel differently about it all if I understood why we were doing this. And I'm not really sure anyone's given a convincing explanation for why we're doing this.
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