What's a sideshow?

This is no sideshow!

Your Bedouin Army, or whatever it calls itself would be a sideshow of a sideshow.

Like you come out of a sideshow.

In my opinion, this whole theater of operations is a sideshow.

Or is it a circus sideshow complete with freaks, magic, and rabblerousing?

We know that they didn't take it. A storm in a teacup, a sideshow.

Having end results things that come back from the printer well, like this little business card for an animation company called Sideshow on lenticular foils.

For eurozone governments, that means that financial markets will now enforce what the political process cannot achieve. The EU s fiscal compact, whatever its final form, will be little more than a sideshow.

MUNICH With global rebalancing set to be high on the agenda at the next G 7 and G 20 meetings, Germany, with its persistent export surplus, will again come under pressure to boost domestic demand and household consumption. But the German consumer is a sideshow.

Of course, should the US see failure ahead, it could seek to broaden the war beyond Iraq s borders by attacking Iran, a policy reminiscent of Operation Sideshow, when US failure in Vietnam in the late 1960 s enticed President Nixon into attacking Cambodia and Laos.

The public debate in America about whether and how to arm or equip the Syrian opposition is an interesting sideshow. But it has nothing to do with the significance and complexity of the tectonic historical forces now grinding their way forward, straining and beginning to tear asunder the region s political landscape.

In some recent cases, the issue has been not much more than an irritating sideshow, as when Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded an apology from the United States late last year for causing unintended civilian deaths at the price, bizarrely, of allowing the Americans to continue defending him and his country (the US understandably refused).

In this context, the selection of the European Commission s next president now the focus of considerable attention is a sideshow. Whoever is chosen will be able to make the EU work only if French President François Hollande can build a domestic pro reform consensus and British Prime Minister David Cameron can convince his electorate that immigrants (only one third of whom come from the poorer EU member states) benefit the UK economy.