So this is the face of senility...

Pat Robertson, ever mindful of his complete and utter irrelevance in world affairs, has apparently been having tea and crumpets with God again.

Longtime readers of the political pages will remember his previous conversations with God, which included "Kill Chavez now!" and the classic episode in which Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke as divine retribution for attempting to bring peace to the holy land.

I had a friend once who was convinced her grandmother (a very nice lady, by all accounts) received messages from God.  Not in the "dove perched by an open window" kind of way, but in a verbal, "Tell so-and-so to turn left instead of right at 12:03pm today."  I was never able to convince her that her grandmother was probably a lifelong schizophrenic of some sort, but she spoke in tongues herself, so I had my work cut out for me there.  [as a side note, how convenient is it that some people are given the gift of speaking in gibberish, and other's the gift of interpreting it?  Let's hear it for accountability!]

What boggles my mind is how people can be so convinced of such a preposterous idea merely because once or twice in a blue moon the recipient of such messages manages to be right.  I mean, you fling enough crap at a wall and something's bound to stick sooner or later.  Which is, of course, exactly what Roberts is doing here.  He's predicting a lot of storms on the coastlines (Imagine that... a storm on the coast.  whodathunkit.)  during a period in which everyone from the meteorologist at the local news to government climatologists to academic geologists has shown that global warming is a) a reality and b) creating conditions for highly active hurricane seasons with stronger-than-normal storms.  Sorry, Pat, you don't get credit for a divine prediction when everyone already knows it.  As for the tsunami prediction, he's clearly using heightened public awareness and fear of tsunamis to get everyone's attention, knowing full well that if a tsunami doesn't show up everyone will forget his little prediction and if it does (unlikely in the extreme) he got lucky.