What am I missing?

When the top stories have to do with whether a governor appeared in blackface, and the deep significance of who got an Oscar, I suspect that somebody is blowing smoke in our eyes. There are some much more important, and much less entertaining, stories that aren't getting covered. I notice that the blackface business put the governor's dance with naked infanticide off the front page.

One example--it may be TDS or may be sleight of hand--is the Russia collusion stories. The gory details turn out to be rather dull and not terribly convincing, but the framework is kept perpetually dramatic. But go back to the basics. Russia is weaker than it was when it ran the USSR. What gives Russia the power it still has is money, and what keeps money flowing is its arms exports and fuel exports. Depressed fuel prices hit Putin hard. Fracking depresses fuel prices. Now explain to me again why Putin was going to try to get somebody elected who would significantly weaken Russia. To refresh your memory, Hillary wanted to restrict or ban fracking--higher fuel prices, stronger Russia.

Another example. Trump seems to go wild with tweets, and runs through team members like a snow blower. But at the end of the day things seem to go well enough. There's no vast centralization of control as real fascists would do. If I had a higher opinion of his skills, I'd suspect he tweets to make opponents go nuts and throw them off balance. Maybe I'm wrong about him. So far the trade negotiations haven't seemed crazy, and there's a fair chance we'll be able to get our troops out of South Korea, and maybe we can undo some of the earlier screw-ups in dealing with Syria. (There never were any "moderate" factions there. It seemed implausible from the get-go, and subsequent events proved it.)

An intellectual lightweight is getting an amazing amount of coverage for risible proposals. While we all sit around and pretend to take her seriously, what else is going on?

Never mind the magician's patter. Watch his hands.