Hypnotized by repetition

An excerpt from CNN's transcript of "Wolf Blitzer Reports" for September 13:

BLITZER: What do you make of this ominous development that North Korea might be on the verge of actually testing a nuclear bomb?

WILLIAM COHEN, FMR. DEFENSE SECRETARY: I think we have to take that very seriously. And the likelihood is that they are planning to conduct a test. ...

It was also I think a signal to the South Koreans as well as to the rest of the international community....

BLITZER: President Bush has made it clear that the United States cannot accept a nuclear North Korea, that Kim Jong Il with a nuclear bomb would not be acceptable. ...

Is it too late for the military option to try to preemptively destroy that capability?

COHEN: I think a military option is probably the least likely means that we can call upon to try and contain whatever program they have now.

If you find nothing striking about that exchange, then you, too, have been benumbed and bedazzled, psychologically sucker-punched.

"Is it too late for the military option to try to preemptively destroy that capability?"

No more than three years ago, talk of "preemptively destroying" facilities, even nuclear ones, in another country would have been controversial. Now it's just routine, an ordinary question, nothing to make note of - the only question is the purely practical one: Is it "too late," or, put the other way, "should we have already 'preemptively' attacked North Korea?"

And the neocons, their claws still wet with Iraqi blood, their eyes shining and their lips drooling as they look toward Iran and Syria, pause a moment to grin.