The seven second rule
Every now and then I try the Seven Second Test. I tune across the radio dial to known stations and count seconds until the relevant Pavlov Bell.

This morning, tuned to BBC: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,GLOBAL WARMING.

Then tuned to NPR: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,GAY.

Then tuned to a local R-label talk station: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,BENGHAZI.

All's right with the world.

But I'm still puzzled by the BENGHAZI bell. This has been constant for a year now.

Until last Sept, all R-label stations were 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,TAX for at least 20 years. I can understand TAX as a Pavlov Bell. Everyone pays taxes (contrary to the 47% idiocy, which was a major sub-bell for a while) and most people are unhappy about paying taxes. Thus it makes sense for political yakkers to yak about TAX, though neither label ever does anything to reform the system.

I can't understand BENGHAZI in this context. The incident was hardly worth noticing. A skirmish in the middle of a hot civil war, killing 4 soldiers whose job is to be in harm's way. No civilians were harmed, and no American territory was involved. (Yeah, yeah, embassies are supposedly American territory in some strange abstract way. Pull the other one.)

If you want to argue against having embassies altogether, I'm with you. If you want to argue against stirring up civil wars to obey our Israeli master, I'm with you. But those aren't the proposed solutions. There isn't a proposed solution. It's just a fucking word that gets repeated every few seconds.

Even by modern partisan standards this is unusually pointless. For a while I thought the purpose was simply to replace the long-conditioned TAX bell with an unrelated word, giving the R-label leadership wiggle room to increase taxes..... but they haven't done anything along those lines, so this explanation doesn't work.
  ¶ 3:37 AM