Nobody projects network war delight better than CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, whose metallic and nasal shrieking lands on virgin zones of mental irritation in these times. Blitzer, the king of the mundane observation and the champion of the generic question, was among the first to ride into virtual battle yesterday. His show, which generally degenerates into that dinner party you can’t wait to ditch, becomes even more unbearable when the main entrée is war. He see-sawed between hysteria—“This is the beginning of a new, a series of actions against the Syrian military?” — and morose panic — “Very, very sad situation unfolding.” After 30 minutes of such exposure, you feel Blitzered, craving relief from vague, hangover-like head pain pulsing through your brain.

The cable channels dress the conflict in snappy graphics and arresting logos, and they make the best of the limited footage they’ve collected to tell the story. Playing on an almost endless loop on all of the channels Friday night was that Pentagon-supplied video of Tomahawks corkscrewing into the night sky suddenly made bright by their tails of fire. MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke for all of TVland on Thursday night as he said, “We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’” The networks screened the “beautiful” Tomahawk video so often and without real purpose that it has become the war’s screensaver.

The networks love war because it allows them to dust off archival footage of planes in the air, ships at sea, howitzers barking, Bashar Assad sitting with Vladimir Putin, and civilians suffering. If you had not yet viewed twitching and dying young victims of this week’s sarin gas attack, the networks were looping that footage, too, as if somebody at network command central had pressed the repeat button on a giant iPod.