Awaiting Pat Robertson's take on the 'quake

I’ve spent the past two days praying for Japanese earthquake victims and looking forward to Pat Robertson’s explanation as to why the poor bastards really had it coming.

For more than 50 years, he’s been a sort of a sin meteorologist. He foretells where the sin storms are most severe and the consequences of living a life that doesn’t involve contributing far right Christian for-profit enterprises like his.

He’s not like the rest of us who react to catastrophe with instinctual humanity. We pray, send money and we feel compassionate pity for the victims of indiscriminate and so-called “acts of God.”

Not Robertson.

Less than two weeks after Hurricane Katrina killed 1,836, Robertson took to the airwaves to pronounce the storm as God’s response to America’s abortion policies.

He said the 2010 Haiti earthquake was the result of an historic “pact with the Devil” Haitian founders made that left the island cursed.

Speaking of cursed, I’d like to hear what Robertson says about the Pittsburgh Pirates, now embarking on 19 seasons without a winning record.

Then there are what should be called “acts of Pat.” These are things God specifically tells him are bound to happen that haven’t.

You sinners may have been too hungover to have heard it, but Robertson on  January 1, 2009, said, “If I’m hearing God right then gold will go to about $1,900 an ounce oil to $300 a barrel. But economically things are going to start turning around.”

Wow. Talk about covering all your bases. He was off on the price of gold by $500 an ounce and overshot oil by $170, but things did start slowly turning around.

And on January 2, 2007 -- and I really have to start tuning into the 700 Club right after Dick Clark signs off -- he said America was going to suffer “mass killings” in the next 12 months.

“The Lord didn’t say nuclear, but I do believe it will be something like that,” he said.

When observant reporters were doing year-end wrap up stories and saw no front page mushroom clouds, they called him on it.

“All I can think is that somehow the people of God prayed and God in his mercy spared us.”

Cue Maxwell Smart: “Missed it by THAT much.”

Sometimes Robertson, 80, seems to have more in common with Hollywood’s Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of “Armageddon” and other disaster films, than with the humble Baptist preacher he claims to be.

He said God told him in January 2006, “If I heard the Lord right about 2006, the coasts of America will be lashed by storms. There may well be something as bad as a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest.” He repeated the tsunami claim four times throughout the year.

The tides that year were more in tune with what you’d find in the Old Farmer’s Almanac than the Old Testament.

My favorite was he in 1976 predicted to much hoopla that the world would end in 1982 (the Pirates last won the World Series in 1979, so Pittsburgh appreciated the grace period).

He really hammered the doomsday prediction home, too, saying in a May 1980 “700 Club” broadcast, “I guarantee you by the end of 1982 there is going to be judgement on the world.”

Missed it by THAT much.

(Reminder: Christian broadcaster Harold Camping, the 89-year-old leader of the Oakland, California, based Family Radio Network, has issued his own scholarly update: world ending May 21. I haven’t paid cash for anything since the announcement three months ago).

I haven’t heard what Robertson’s had to say with the competing doomsday prediction.

You’d have to think, him being in the doomsday prediction business, Robertson secretly hopes something horrific will happen to people he judges as so morally inferior just so he could enjoy one of the world’s best “I told you so’s.”

Sure, it would mean the deaths of thousands of innocents, but it would prove he’s right -- as if anyone familiar with Robertson’s Christian Coalition needed further proof he’s really right.

It's only natural. We all want to be our predictions to come true. We all want to say “I told you so.”

I mean, we’re all only human, right?

Hmmm . . .

I may have discovered the root of the problem with Pat.