Beware the perils of prophecy

Have you ever had a premonition? Or what you believed to be a message to yourself or others about the future? Did you act on it? Did you deliver the message?

It’s hard to know the difference between being truly prophetic and merely being a prognosticator. There are so many people prediciting what is going to happen to the economy, our national security, and all other and sundry types of information, it creates a miasma of information that is difficult to sort out.

An additional problem is the proclivity of public relations practitioners to advise their clients to predict how bad or good things are going to be in order to spin public perception toward them in a favorable way. We have seen a round of this last weekend as numerous politicians took to the air waves to tell us that the economy is going to get worse before it gets better. When things do get worse, these same politicians can avoid responsibility for their share in the problem. When they get better, they can take credit for things getting better.

One of the chief practitioners of this art is the Bloviator in Chief, Joe Biden. This morning a well-circulated report has him predicting that casualties in Afghanistan are going to rise. That’s because they inherited a “real mess.” Up until this point I suppose that Afghanistan has been a faux mess. Clearly it is all President Bush’s fault. Of course, the fact that it is difficult to tell the difference between a terrorist and a civilian is seldom mentioned. What I can’t figure out is, how can Biden get away with this?

My opinion, in the long run he can’t. I am already tired of these predictions. I am also sick and tired of hearing that we are in the “Greatest Economic Crisis Since the Great Depression.” I mean, what is this, a new mini-series? Quit talking about it and do something!