FOX News analyst Liz Trotter, while discussing the Hillary RFK gaffe, mistakenly calls Obama "Osama," then, catching her error, laughingly goes on to joke of assassinating "both, if we could." [h/t Think Progress]

There is a Bruce Sterling novel (I think. Maybe Neal Stephenson? My books are still in storage) that includes the idea of a spam assassination engine. In the book, highly intelligent people known to suffer from certain forms of violence-producing mental illness are constantly spammed with encoded emails that subliminally suggest that a given target must be killed. The program is autonomous and long running, and it only needs one successful "conversion" in order to be measured a "success." You send out an encoded email a day to a million susceptible and capable people until someone tries to kill the target. What is that over five years? 1.8 billion messages, one assassination and a 0.000000054% conversion rate?

How many people were exposed to Hillary's gaffe or Trotter's joke either directly or in the context of reporting? I don't know which FOX segment Trotter was on, but, according to last week's ratings, FOX News tended to have between 800-900K people tuned into the channel every day during its daytime hours last week. What's a conservative estimate for the number of people who saw just that one clip? 100K? 200?

How many more such jokes will there be between now and November just on FOX? (FOX jokes about killing Obama times 100K viewers = ? between now and November?) What about if Obama wins? How many times will an equivalence be created between Obama and Osama bin Laden on air or online? How many joking references will there be to killing Obama in the first year of his presidency alone? How about the whole four years or during the 2012 campaign? Will the Secret Service investigate every single one of these jokes? Will they knock on Hillary's door or Liz Trotter's?