The Word according to Pat

Thanks, Pat Robertson. Thanks a lot. Great way to start the year. You sure know to kill a party.

As if the country wasn't nervous enough about the spectre of terrorism, the televangelist provocateur and amateur Nostradamus has belched up his latest forecast: the United States will see a terroristic event involving mass casualties sometime later this year.

“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” Robertson said on his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

If there's any good news in all of this, it's the fact that Robertson's track record for prognostication has been spotty at best.

In January 2004 he predicted that President Bush would easily win re-election. Bush won 51 percent of the vote that fall, beating Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. He also predicted Bush’s victory for a second term in 2005.

But back in May, he said God told him that storms and possibly a tsunami would hit the United States in 2006 (no word on whether the Great Seer saw Katrina coming the year before).

Sometimes his pronouncements aren't so much predictive as a nasty case of schadenfreude: the Oracle of the Ariwaves suggested, in January 2006, that God punished Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli Prime Minister, with a coma-inducing stroke for ceding Israeli land to the Palestinians.

That darn Pat, you never know what he'll say next. We're waiting patiently for his forecast of the outcome of the Iraq war. It'll do wonders for his ratings if not his relationship with God. If it strikes the right chord, who knows? Pat Robertson might be in line for a Cabinet post, a seat alongside the seers of the administration, more adept with dartboards than with data.