CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper just dropped a five-minute video that plays like a highlight reel from the most lopsided beatdown in modern military history. Operation Epic Fury has destroyed 43 Iranian ships, cut their missile attacks by 90%, slashed drone attacks by 83%, and delivered over 3,000 strikes across 24 provinces. Oh, and the Supreme Leader is dead.

Somebody check on CNN. They might need a wellness visit.

Admiral Cooper reported that there is not a single Iranian ship underway in the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, or the Gulf of Oman. Zero. The entire Iranian navy — every last vessel — is either sitting on the ocean floor or too afraid to leave port. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “the most lethal, most complex, and most-precision aerial operation in history.”

Democrats and their friends in the media took one look at this scoreboard and did what they always do — they tried to make America winning into a bad thing. Tim Kaine dusted off his war powers resolution and demanded a vote to rein in President Trump. The Senate crushed it 47-53. Not even close. Rand Paul was the only Republican who crossed over, and John Fetterman was the only Democrat with enough spine to vote against his own party.

(Fetterman said he was “baffled” that his colleagues won’t support destroying Iran’s nuclear program. We’re baffled that Fetterman is the only Democrat in the Senate who seems to live on planet Earth, but here we are.)

The best part of the week, though, happened on CNN. The network brought on Kian Tajbakhsh, a former Iranian political prisoner, presumably expecting him to cry about the mean Americans bombing his former captors. Instead, Tajbakhsh looked at the CNN panel and said, “I don’t think it’s right to say that President Trump has started a war with Iran. I think President Trump wants to finish a war that Iran started in 1979.”

You could hear the producers scrambling for the commercial break button.

But Tajbakhsh wasn’t done. He dropped the line that sent CNN into full cardiac arrest: “You can draw a straight line from the 2015 nuclear deal to October 7th.” Host Abby Phillip stammered — “We… we… we do have to go to a break here” — and cut to commercial before the man could finish explaining how Barack Obama’s precious Iran deal funded the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

That’s what happens when you bring an actual victim of the Iranian regime onto your propaganda network. The script doesn’t hold up when the guest has the scars to prove you wrong.

Meanwhile, Ashley Allison — one of CNN’s liberal panelists — spent her segment confused about whether we were even at war with Iran. Ma’am, we sank 43 of their ships and killed their Supreme Leader. What exactly would qualify as a war in your world? Does someone have to send a formal invitation on cardstock?

Here’s what the scoreboard crowd and the CNN producers don’t want you thinking about: Iran has been here before, and it didn’t end well for them last time either.

In 1988, Iran mined a US Navy frigate in the Persian Gulf. We responded with Operation Praying Mantis — one single day of fighting that destroyed half of Iran’s operational navy. Half their fleet, gone in an afternoon. The Iranians spent the next 38 years rebuilding, buying new frigates, commissioning a shiny new drone carrier, and convincing themselves they were a real naval power.

It took us about a week to sink all of it. Every last ship they spent nearly four decades building. That’s not a war — that’s a repo job.

And this time, there’s no rebuilding. Iran’s entire naval capability is gone, which means their number-one piece of leverage over the rest of the world just evaporated. For decades, every time the mullahs wanted to rattle the global economy, they threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint where 20% of the world’s oil passes through every day. “Nice oil prices you’ve got there,” they’d sneer. “Be a shame if something happened to them.”

That threat is now as dead as Khamenei. You can’t blockade a strait when your entire navy is a reef.

Mark my words — the ripple effects here go way beyond the military scoreboard. Iran’s proxy networks were already broke after USAID got gutted and DOGE followed the money. Now the home office is gone too. No navy, no missiles worth mentioning, no Supreme Leader, and a new “leader” — Khamenei’s son Mojtaba — who the IRGC is already treating like a puppet. “Sure kid, you’re the Supreme Leader. Now sit in the corner while the generals figure out how to surrender without losing face.”

The regime that’s been terrorizing the Middle East since 1979 is a paper tiger with no teeth, no claws, and no zookeeper. Every proxy group from Hezbollah to the Houthis is doing the same math right now: if Iran can’t protect its own navy, it sure as hell can’t protect us.

Democrats wanted to stop this. They actually tried to vote to stop this. Let that sink in alongside Iran’s 43 ships. Tim Kaine wanted to pull the plug while we were winning the most decisive military operation since Desert Storm, and 46 of his colleagues went right along with him.

Fetterman had the best line of the whole week: “Every member of the US Senate agrees we cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.” Then he asked the obvious follow-up that apparently nobody else had considered: so why won’t you support the only action that actually achieves that?

We’d love to hear the answer. But CNN already cut to commercial.