There's something I don't get about Frank Rich's column today (here, but behind the stupid subscription wall). The last paragraph begins with this sentence:
Call it a coincidence — though there are no coincidences — but it’s only fitting that the Libby trial began as news arrived of the death of E. Howard Hunt, the former C.I.A. agent whose bungling of the Watergate break-in sent him to jail and led to the unraveling of the Nixon presidency two years later.
What does Rich mean by that interjection "though there are no coincidences"? He can't mean it literally: obviously there are some coincidences, and obviously the proximity of Libby's trial to Hunt's death is one. People who say "there are no coincidences" usually mean to imply the existence of some dark conspiracy, and indeed the column is about a White House conspiracy to defame Joseph Wilson, but surely Rich doesn't mean to suggest a material connection (as opposed to a thematic or associative connection) between that conspiracy and Howard Hunt's death from pneumonia at 88.
I'm sure I'm being too literal here, but I honestly can't figure out what Rich thinks he means. My best guess is that the phrase "there are no coincidences" has somehow lodged in his head (it's not an uncommon phrase), and when he types the word coincidence in a context of skullduggery it muscles its way into the sentence. Does anyone have a better explanation? Post it in the comments.
