WORLD AT WAR: Aaannnd, we’re back. The skiing was great while the world caught fire. 

  President Trump yesterday said he attacked Iran because he had a “feeling” that Iran was about to attack first. He did not cite any intelligence report, who, what, and to what end Iran was about to attack. He said the regime “would soon have missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America.”

  In an administration that often cannot get its stories straight, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Israel was about to attack Iran and that would result in counter-attacks against US forces in the region, “and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks we would suffer higher casualties.” 

  Today is the 5^th day of the war opened by Trump and Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu to bring down the murderous Muslim regime that has ruled Iran for 50 years. It appears that what happened is that Israel planned the successful strike that knocked out Iran’s leadership and Trump jumped in to wipe out Iran’s military infrastructure and future ability to make nuclear weapons, taking credit for the whole thing.

  Although he encouraged the population to rise against their oppressors, Trump said he had thought he would pick the new leaders of Iran after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his inner circle were killed in the opening wave Saturday morning. The President said that “Most of the people we had in mind are dead … and now we have another group, they may be dead also, based on reports … pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.” 

  Trump evidently had no plan for the future of Iran before the bombing started and none now. “I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” Trump said. “Right, that could happen?” It could. For the moment, Khamenei’s son Mojtaba is emerging as a contender to succeed his father. 

  Someone in the Iranian government and military is still giving orders, resulting in counter attacks on US and Israeli facilities in 10 countries, including on the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia on Monday and yesterday the US consulate in Dubai that was left in flames. Six US service members were killed Saturday in Kuwait during the opening salvos of missiles. As many as 160 girls were killed when an errant bomb hit a school in Tehran.

  Never forget that with Donald Trump there’s always an element of what’s in it for him, and in this case it might be oil. Trump is on a worldwide campaign to block the development of alternative energies … wind and solar … and return to burning of fossil fuels. Iran has the third largest oil reserves in the world, but under Western economic sanctions much of it is selling cheap to China.   

THE INTEL: Israeli intelligence is something out of espionage fiction. They’re the people who suppled Hezbollah militants in Lebanon with exploding beepers and sent a fatal message.

  Years ago, according to new reports, Israel hacked into the network of traffic cameras in Tehran, allowing them a real-time view of the movements of Iranian leaders and even their security details. 

  The Financial Times reports that the traffic video combined with human sources, signals intelligence, intercepted communications, and satellite imagery provided so much information that it required super computers to sort.  The intel has allowed Israel to knock out senior Iranians for years, culminating the pinpoint bombing on Saturday that wiped out the leadership.

WAR ECON 101: The Dow jones dropped more than 1,000 points in the first two days of the week because war makes the money people nervous. It should. The price of oil has risen anywhere from $4 to $9 a barrel since the start of bombing and is likely to climb higher. 

IT’S POLITICAL: Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn appears is headed to a runoff against the state’s Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton for the party’s nomination to run for Senate in the fall. It’s already the most expensive Senate race in history with more than $100 million spent.

  Cornyn is a “pre-Trump” Republican who has served since 2002. Paxton is a Bible thumping 2020 election denier who has been indicted for fraud, impeached, caught having an affair, and filed to divorce his wife on “Biblical” grounds. Moral character is not a disqualifier in Republican politics.

THE REGIME:

— Testifying before The Senate Judiciary Committee, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem refused to back down from her initial claims that two Minneapolis protesters shot dead by federal officers were engaged in domestic terrorism. 

  North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis compared the shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to Noem’s infamous memoir anecdote about shooting her untrainable hunting dog.

— A federal judge in New York ruled that President Trump cannot kill Manhattan’s congestion toll on vehicles entering midtown Manhattan. The toll designed to reduce gridlock has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for public transportation and other projects.

MERRY CHRISTMAS: A Georgia jury took only two hours in a novel case to find Colin Gray guilty of murder for giving his son an assault rifle for Christmas, failing to keep it safely, and ignoring red flags in his son’s behavior before the gun was used in a 2024 school shooting in which two students and two teachers were killed.

  Colt Gray, now 16, was allowed to keep the gun in his room and faces murder charges.

  Prosecutors in recent years have been charging parents in some extreme cases in which their children commit crimes. The parents of a Michigan school shooter were sent way for 10 to 15 years.   

BELOW THE FOLD: Brad Reese, grandson of the creator of Reese’s peanut butter cups, is campaigning to get the Hershey company to return to making the iconic candy with real chocolate and peanut butter rather than “compound coatings and peanut butter with peanut‑butter‑style crèmes.” Good luck.

-30-