Media barely notices Obama's Libyan airstrikes against ISIS.

The U.S. campaign against ISIS that began two years ago – now 50,000 bombs and 20,000 dead ISIS fighters later – expanded to a fourth country Aug. 1 when the Obama Administration announced airstrikes in Libya.

You’d hardly notice, however, even if you follow U.S. media. While the airstrikes themselves were reported by most major outlets, they were done so in a matter-of-fact way, and only graced the front pages of major American newspapers for a day.

Even many center-left outlets barely touched on the massive mission creep. Slate, Mother Jones, and Buzzfeed all ran more stories about Donald Trump’s dust-up with an infant than on what was effectively the start of a new war. ABC World News Tonight mentioned the Libyan airstrikes for 20 seconds, and NBC Nightly News didn’t mention them at all. The president’s announcement that the U.S. is bombing a new country has become entirely banal.

This is by design. Obama’s “frog in boiling water” approach to war removes a clear deadline, thus stripping his use of military force of the urgency of, say, George Bush’s “48 hours to get out of Baghdad” approach.

Meanwhile, an anti-ISIS bombing campaign that began as “limited,” “targeted” airstrikes in Iraq two years ago expanded to Syria six weeks later, then to Afghanistan in January 2016, then to Libya this week. Combat troops and special forces have also crept into play, with U.S. military personnel first appearing in Iraq and Syria in 2014, 2015 or 2016, depending on how one defines “boots” and “ground.”

That the U.S. is bombing a new country has become entirely banal.

All of this has unfolded with U.S. media that almost never put these developments in a broader context. Instead, news outlets report each expansion as if it were obvious and inevitable. The war just is, and because it’s done piecemeal, there doesn’t seem much to get outraged over.

Had Obama announced on Aug. 7, 2014, that he planned on bombing four countries and deploying troops to two of them to fight a war with “no end point,” would the American public have gone along with it? Probably not.

To authorize his perma-campaign, Obama’s administration has dubiously invoked the 15-year-old, one-page Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed three days after 9/11. The president has to do this, the White House and friendly media claim, because Congress “refuses” to act to authorize the war (notice that’s a rubber-stamp question of when, not if). But such apologism largely rests on a tautology: Congress doesn’t have a sense of urgency to authorize the war because the public doesn’t, and the public doesn’t because the media have yawned with each new iteration.

Obama’s mission creep, without public debate or congressional sanction, goes on without examination of what it may entail for future presidents, let alone the present one. This is the new normal, and it’s a new normal the press codifies every time it treats Obama’s ever-expanding war as dull and barely newsworthy.

ADAM H. JOHNSON is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org