What do Joe Biden and Carnac the Magnificent have in common?

Shawn Macomber calls Joe Biden “The fifth nag of the Apocalypse,” based in part on his claim to prophetic wisdom:

The nation continues to pay the price for not listening to Joe Biden.
Just ask Joe Biden.
“On September the 10th, the day before the attack on the World Trade towers, I gave a speech at the National Press Club,” Biden told the two hundred high school and college students gathered at College Convention ’08, striking his best Nostradamus pose, head tilted slightly forward, focusing an intense seconds-long stare on any student who happened to make eye contact.
“In that speech I predicted there would be a massive attack on the United States of America from terrorists and it would come in the belly of a plane.”

Looking around on the Web for Biden’s September 10 National Press Club speech, I found the complete text here and full audio here. The speech in its entirety is an attack on missile defense. Thus spake Joe the Magnificent toward the end of his long, long speech:

[T]hey [the Bush administration]’re willing to pull out of an ABM Treaty that sends the signal to the rest of the world the end of arms control has arrived. And what protection do we have in the near term, let alone down the road?
Sure, we’ll do all we can to defend ourselves against any threat, nobody denies that, but even the Joint Chiefs says that a strategic nuclear attack is less likely than a regional conflict, a major theater war, terrorist attacks at home or abroad, or any number of other real issues. We’ll have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat, while the real threat comes to this country in the hold of a ship, the belly of a plane, or smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.
And I ask you, you want to do us damage, are you more likely to send a missile you’re not sure can reach us with a biological or chemical weapon because you don’t have the throw weight to put a nuclear weapon on it and no one’s anticipating that in the near term, with a return address saying, “It came from us, here’s where we are?” Or are you more likely to put somebody with a backpack crossing the border from Vancouver down to Seattle, or coming up the New York Harbor with a rusty old ship with an atom bomb sitting in the hull? Which are you more likely to do? And what defense do we have against those other things?

In context, the looming threats conjured by Biden were nothing more than standard-issue liberal garb to adorn an utterly stupid argument against missile defense. Biden advocated for the higher wisdom of amending the ABM Treaty. Though he is substantially less funny than Carnac the Magnificent, Joe Biden is just about as much a seer as Carnac was.

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