And what does this say about our national psyche?

I was noticing various headlines this morning that all had some variation on "Obama authorizes air strikes in Iraq." If a person actually linked on the headline, then you'd learn that Obama also authorized air drops of humanitarian aid (food and water) to the Yazidis (Iraqis who practice a non-Islamic religion) who had taken refuge on a mountain top.

You'd also learn, if you went past the first couple of sentences in any of the news articles, that the humanitarian air drops have already taken place. They started immediately. As for the air strikes against the Islamist militants? They're still in the theoretical stage: they're threatened but not yet happening. So why did the media emphasize the threat over the reality? I have no answer, but a good guess would be that doing something nice (humanitarian aid) is just never going to be as news worthy as threatening to kill someone. If it bleeds (or if it might bleed), it leads.

I did notice that Obama tacked a nice little caveat on to the air strikes promise -- "if Americans are threatened" -- so he's got a nice out for never following through with actual bombs.

Update: Okay, so we've dropped a couple bombs. Now the question is just how many we'll drop before someone decides it's enough.