t-keela: The problem with you harping on these “strange coincidences” is that they draw attention away from the real issues in this campaign and allow Bush supporters to attack some silly straw-men ideas.
The real coincidences we should be focussing on are some like these, for example (although I welcome others to chime in with their own!):
(1) The tax cuts that George Bush has enacted coincidentally give an inordinate amount of the breaks to those like Bush and his buddies who are in the top 1% [and this has happened coincidentally at a time when this group has done fantastically (200% increase in real after-tax incomes between 1979 and 2000) while the middle class has seen very little (15% increase…with most of that coming in the boom of the late 90s) and the bottom has seen even less to none].
(2) The Iraq situation has turned into a debacle as well as a complete P.R. disaster for the United States, which is coincidentally what those of us against the war predicted could very well happen (although we generally were not imaginative enough to predict there would be absolutely no WMDs found and that the prisoner abuse scandal would occur).
(3) The solutions that the Bush Administration finds for every problem are coincidentally the same as their original ideology dictated to them that they should be no matter how the problem changes. (We have a surplus? We need to enact these tax cuts to give the money back to the people. Oh, now we have a recession? We need to enact these exact same tax cuts to stimulate the economy. Oh, now we have a big budget deficit? We need to enact these same tax cuts to grow the economy and grow our way out of the deficit [insert suppply side voodoo here].)
(4) The Bush Administration has coincidentally used deception, fear, and lies to sell its policies across the entire spectrum of issues, well beyond that which has normally been used in American political discourse at least as far as I can remember.
(5) Some of the biggest beneficiaries of many of the Bush policies (the power companies, the pharmaceutical industry) are coincidentally big campaign contributors to Bush and the Republicans.
(6) The missile defense system has coincidentally come online as supposedly operational just before the 2004 election. And, this is certainly quite a coincidence since it is in fact way before this system has actually shown itself to work under any sort of realistic operational conditions.
And, we can go on and on. And, the advantages of these “coincidences” is that they aren’t vague with unclear implications. It is all too clear that they are more than just coincidences.
