Updates on My Vague Predictions

Way back at the beginning of the year, I wrote my Pat Robertson is a fraud post. In it, I made some vague predictions, in the vein of Marion Gordon Robertson's ones that seem to be becoming a yearly tradition. Let's see how my vague predictions are doing. (Original predictions regular font, updates in italics.)

• A football player will be killed in a car accident sometime in 2008. (deliberately vague, as "football" could refer to either soccer or American football.) Todd Doxey, college football player from University of Oregon, died July 13. Terrence Kiel, San Diego Chargers, died July 4. That is just a couple from July 2008, and doesn't even cover soccer players, and then not even foreign athletes.


• Storms will pound the coast of the U.S. Or they might not. (Hurricane Dolly


• 2008 will be a year of worldwide halitosis. Conveniently difficult to confirm


• There will be big news on the day of July 23rd, 2008. I don't know what it will be though. Hurricane Dolly made landfall. Maybe there was big news in your life, or someone you know. Or maybe in a totally different country. I conveniently did not specify what sort of big news it was.

How about Robertson's predictions? "A year of worldwide violence." Give me a break. Every year is filled with worldwide violence. "A recession followed by a stock market crash by 2010." Give me another break (I like to take lots of breaks). You're not special just because you make vague predictions about the economy...especially predictions that other non-inspired people are making.

If he just wants attention, it seems like it would almost be better for Pat to make predictions that would truly be monumental or infamous, were they to actually occur. If the year 2008 is indeed a year of worldwide violence, no one will point to Pat and say "Wow, he was surely right." On the other hand, people might remember Pat if he made wild predictions eventually turn out true. Like nuclear attacks on the U.S, though that wouldn't really be something to be proud of predicting correctly.