Sometimes - almost always, in fact - more than one thing happens at the same time. The SCIF stunt will be forgotten in another day or two but the Syria situation won't.

You don't see an escalating pattern of fuck-up, distract, fuck-up bigger, distract bigger?

Can you envision a "we" that might be larger than just you?

While you were looking at that photo EarlG posted of white guys standing around, the Russians took over the Middle East.

Nice going.

Do you really think the turk and russian would have made a different decision if the American news consumer had been paying closer attention to their closed meeting? I dont. I'm pretty sure putin and erdogan don't give a damn about about american public opinion. I'm also pretty sure Americans are right to be attentve to the Republican violations of national security.

the same media lets our Trump-manufactured national shame fall off the front pages?

I do.

I see the shame deepening every day. It turns out trump gave prior approval of the stunt although it was a violation of fed law and security protocols. This doesn't help him, it's a revelation of the continuance of his criminal inclinations.

reputation of the US on the world stage for generations to come is nowhere to be found among the top stories of the day.

I read that trump would like to send a battalion of tanks to defend the Syrian oil fields, after removing the troops defending the Kurds. These are also just headlines without detail. But I know them because they are reported and so can anyone else. At this point his engineered distractions are feeding his own condemnation. The Russian/Turkish partitioning of Syria and collective punishment/removal of the Kurds is in the news, it is not ignored. Trump's betrayal there isn't forgotten.

very brief and well handled. The hearing went on and we kept paying attention to all the significant
factors involved in the impeachment process and other failures brought about by the tRUMP administration. The reTHUGS know that they've already lost so we can expect more distractions that
won't change the long-term outcome a bit.

I can be aware of more than one issue at a time and I don't live life based on what priorities the churning news cycle is presenting.

The information stays online and, to me, it is more about who cares to know about it enough to find out what is going on. I would be more concerned about people who don't pay attention or are just apathetic about it all.

So, maybe framing it as a sucker game and an intentional distraction is a matter of false equivalences? Referring to "we" is generalizing, to say the least. I don't think it is necessary to put it in that context at all.

called the scif stormers a “Gaggle of Goofballs”!

Many people can process more than one thing at a time.

They have been trying to recover since.

This particular one is ridiculous. So this is a distraction? Matt fucking Goetz is some kind of 8th dimensional chess master who does the one thing that can distract from Russia’s master plan? Fuck, no. He’s a lawless goddamn moron who pulled a spectacularly stupid political stunt to try to gin up sympathy for Trump.

What’s happening in Turkey/Syria is nothing more than the master, Putin, pulling on his moron puppet Trump’s strings. It doesn’t need a distraction because Putin has his personal fellator in place who will do his bidding without giving fuck one about what anyone in the US thinks. Goetz’ stunt was newsworthy and Jesus Christ, it wasn’t a “distraction” from Syria just because you’d prefer the news cover that instead.

I’m beginning to give the “distraction” posts the same kind of eye roll that I get when some Trump moron brings up Qanon.

They were so busy performing that they forgot they were security risks, too.

I'm sick of being accused of being distracted when I comment. It's ridiculous.

Personally, I think that is worth more than a day in the headlines and an eyeroll. But that's me.

The eye rolling is at the "distraction" posts, not at the ethnic cleansing. But nice straw man there.

Some of us can actually, you know, be concerned with more than one thing at once, and don't need pedantic lectures on how we should be paying attention to one thing at the exclusion of everything else. By the way, the Goetz stunt is an attempt to affect an investigation that involves Trump, who enabled the ethnic cleansing at the behest of Putin and Erdogan. Take Trump out of leadership while exposing the corruption of both his administration and the Republican Party in general, and perhaps a different power structure is elected in this country that will actually do something about the ethnic cleansing - more than hand-wringing on a bulletin board and scolding other posters. Do you see where this is leading? Can you connect the dots? Getting Trump out of office is the single most crucial step in actually doing something for the Kurdish people. Therefore, anything that affects the investigation into his corruption has relevance to the ethnic cleansing, and that certainly includes Goetz's stunt. You might think about stepping back and taking a look at the bigger picture.

The worst thing about this situation is that Trump has been able to destroy so many lives so quickly, and a remedy is going to come slowly.

They're not that smart, and we're not that dumb. We didn't "fall for" anything. It's just a three-ring circus of a shit-show... there's ALWAYS something going on.