If you watch cable news, you've probably heard the talking heads say, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
     This quotation, attributed to various people--some ancient Chinese proverb writer, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and much more recently, Rita Mae Brown--must be examined, like all overused statements in news media.  These utterances exist in long drifting clouds over time, sometimes coming from televised mouths for months or years.  "Thrown under the bus," and its variations, "They threw him under the bus," and others, stuck around on cable news as long as the term "train wreck," as in, "It's like a train wreck--it's horrible but you can't look away."
     I am literal-minded sometimes.  I tend to picture what it would take for someone to be thrown under a bus, and why a bus?  Someone of competitive bodybuilder strength could throw a politician under a passing bus, but in big cities like New York, people are more likely to get pushed off a subway platform by a sociopath.  "Boy," the cable news host might remark metaphorically, "they sure pushed Joe Biden off a subway platform."
     I've never seen a train wreck in person, but I've seen freeway and city street car wrecks, and yes, I gawked every time.  There's a song by a band I don't remember called "Casualty Vampires."  When a building's on fire people gather.  Same with a train wreck.  The World Trade Center in its last hour or so was surrounded by casualty vampires who should've gotten the hell out of there, but staring at chaos is human nature.
     On a much less violent, but nevertheless annoying note, cable news people have taken to putting the word so before most of what they say when answering questions.  I'm not sure when this started, but it's one of the long drifting clouds of senseless speech coming from college-educated TV professionals.  A host asks a guest about ISIS and its latest atrocities.  The guest replies, "So, ISIS has a political strategy that needs to be taken into account here..."
     What is the purpose of "So"?  As a two letter word it doesn't provide adequate time for the guest to figure out what to say, as when Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) sometimes takes out a cigarette and lights it before he answers an irritated adversary.  Smoking doesn't happen in TV studios anymore, so I guess the "So" is more of a verbal hiccup, like "like," "um," and "you know what I'm sayin?"
     One could answer the cable host with a musical reference: "So, an album by Peter Gabriel, the ISIS threat is not only an existential one, but an egregious affront to human decency."
     Another meaningless utterance plaguing cable news minds, especially in the past few years, though its lessened quite a bit, is the linking phrase, "At the end of the day..."
     "Chris Christie suffered a loss of popularity in the polls due to Bridgegate, but at the end of the day, he's on a resurgence as he makes a possible bid for the Republican nomination." 
     "At the end of the day" means however.  When women say the meaningless utterance, it can come out singsong, stretching a news discussion segment by two or three seconds, sounding as if authority has been proclaimed on whatever subject.  "In conclusion," would work as well, but that has the smell of a lecture. 
     When I hear "At the end of the day" I sometimes wonder, "Which day?  And do you mean at sundown, by which time the outlaws must be gone from Dodge City?"
     Returning to "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."  First, this is not the definition of insanity.  What's more, there isn't one definition of insanity.  Anyone looking in a dictionary can see that most English words have more than one meaning.  Here's how The American College Dictionary, published 1958--the dictionary closest to hand, but adequate for this purpose--defines insanity:
     "1. condition of being insane; more or less permanent derangement of one or more psychical functions , due to disease of the mind.  2. Law. such unsoundness of mind as effects legal responsibility or capacity.  3. extreme folly.  Syn.  1. derangement, dementia; lunacy, craziness, madness."
     Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is not necessarily madness.  An aspiring actor going to audition after audition has to expect he'll someday be hired, otherwise, what's the point?  Using the United States military to visit violence on the Middle East over and over again and expecting the situation there to improve may very well be insane.
     One might ask, "Why do you, Vic Neptune, watch cable news if it irritates you so?"
     I don't watch it that much, certainly not more than a half hour to an hour a day, changing channels back and forth.  I don't expect cable news to improve even though I look at it over and over, so, according to cable talking heads, I'm not insane.

                                                                            Vic Neptune