Subterfuge.  Pick one.  The president is good at it.  Does he do it intentionally?  Probably, after all Roy Cohn, the master of sleaze and dirty tricks, taught him well.  But is Trump that smart?  Who knows?

23 October 1983, two suicide bombers detonate truck bombs in Beirut, killing 220 Marines and many others.

25 October 1983, the United States invades Grenada, a small Caribbean island.  The “reasons” were many, Cubans building an airport, rescuing medical students, and more.

We (as well as others) have a history like this.  Are these two events related?  We’ll likely never know for sure.  What we can be sure of is that the Marines shouldn’t have been in Beirut.  The Grenada invasion changed the news cycle.  Instead of pictures of flag wrapped coffins coming home from Lebanon in a clear display of Regan’s policy failure we watched a mini war.  I’m sure the Marines and the families of the dead didn’t forget, but the rest of the country did.

So…  When the country should be talking about the threat of war with North Korea, be focusing on the latest attack on the ACA, or the failure to provide relief to Puerto Rico, what are we talking about?  NFL players.  Yes, racism is real.  Yes, we need to talk about it, deal with the fact that black men are more likely to be killed by police than any other demographic group, but that isn’t the conversation.  It’s about “firing” people (almost all African Americans) for taking a stand against hate.

Is it a diversion?  You decide.

Resist