Bill’s excellent piece this morning on the latest war-mongering surrounding Iran brought to mind a post from last April that might also be of interest; from the end of that item:

Speaking of moral depravity and craven villainy, the other morning
on National Public Radio (a "liberal" media outlet, as the
ideologically deluded in America say) a reporter explained calmly that
President Bush was "keeping all options on the table" with respect to
Iran, including "a tactical nuclear strike."
This latter "option" was mentioned without further comment, without
pause, without any hint that the President of the United States had
just been accused of contemplating a war crime of such
extraordinary proportions that, if the world were not annihilated in
the ensuing international conflagration, Bush would go down in history
not simply as the worst President in American history,
but as one of the great moral monsters in the history of humanity.  One
imagines being in Germany circa 1938, listening to some stately radio
newscaster reporting that "Hitler is keeping all options on the table"
with respect to the Lebensraum problem, "including invading all neighboring nations" and "genocide of the Jews." 

"And now we turn to the sports news…"

Erich Fromm’s idea of the "pathology of normalcy" seems the only apt characterization for this state of affairs.