TomDispatch - Surprise!
Surprise!:
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com, August 2004

Among Bush administration opponents -- and not just those on the Internet either -- there's a deep-seated, Florida-inspired, and not unreasonable fear of an October or even November 2nd 'surprise.' Over the last year, for instance, there have been spasms of Diebold-mania (in honor of one of the Republican-donor firms making the paper-trail-less, touch-screen-computer voting machines, considered quite capable of producing a Florida II).

Or what about those 'felon lists,' endlessly purged in Baby Bush's state of perfectly un-felonesque African-American Floridians but not of (usually Republican-voting) Hispanics, felonious or otherwise? Michael Moore is heading for the state on Election Day, camera in hand, but who isn't?

Then there have been those conspiracy-theory rumors that Osama bin Laden is already an administration captive held in a spiderhole somewhere in Pakistan until needed at the end of October? " ... [...more]

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I'm sure all of you could come up with your own lists of ways this administration has been and may continue to be ambushed, but here's a little starter-list of my own -- ten surprises this administration proved remarkably unprepared for.

1. "Mission Accomplished": On May 2, 2003, Bush officials halted, the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier on its way home, some thirty miles off San Diego, so that our warrior President, instead of walking up a gangplank, could arrive far more dramatically by jet, mug with the troops, get photo ops galore, and then address his "fellow Americans" on the carrier deck against the backdrop of a specially prepared banner that proclaimed "mission accomplished."
The first sentences of his now-infamous speech included: "[M]ajor combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country."
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- posted by ARYABHATT @ 10:55 am