The writer Emma Bull is quoted as saying, “Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.” I’m not sure if it is levers, pulleys, and strings moving Maureen Dowd, Katrina vanden Heuvel, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, or just hands up the nether regions like controlling a muppet, but if we look carefully enough I think we are seeing an orchestrated messaging machine from the Democratic Party.

On August 14, 2012, writing in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd wrote, “He’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in.”

On the very same day writing in the pages of the Washington Post, MSNBC’s favorite Marxist Katrina van den Heuvel wrote, “[B]eneath that Ken doll head of hair, behind the carefully cultivated image of a brave pseudo-policy wonk, lies a cruel ideologue. And it’s Ryan’s GOP now.”

Hmmmmm . . . two columns by two feminist oriented writers as the two big narrative setting newspapers both focused on Paul Ryan being cute and cruel — a shared word choice and theme.

Maybe there is nothing there. But then, also in the pages of the Washington Post, we have Katherine Boyle, also on August 14th, writing about Paul Ryan’s fashion choices and slightly rumpled, “sloppy” dress. Ms. Boyle gives heavy emphasis to the comparison between Romney and Ryan’s styles.

The very next day, in the pages of the New York Times, Cathy Horyn writes about, well, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s styles. Notably, Ms. Horyn admits her “editor asked me to write a critique.”

Ms. Boyle, at the Washington Post, referred to Paul Ryan as “wear[ing] a suit that looked two sizes too big.” Ms. Horyn noted Mr. Ryan “swimming in his coat.”

One might say it is a random act of reportorial coincidence, but the New York Times and Washington Post running two leftwing columnists and two style section writers at the same time on the same topics with the same themes with one admitting it was an editor asking for it? I’m putting my money on levers, pulleys, and string.