When religious eccentrics predict that the world is coming to an end, as Harold Camping did last week, it's the occasion for much merrymaking in the media, but as Dennis Prager points out, when it comes to failed doomsday predictions it's hard to outdo the record amassed by the Left.
In the sixties it was out-of-control population growth, written about by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book The Population Bomb, that was supposed to unleash the four horsemen of the apocalypse on the world by 1990.
In the seventies it was the fear of nuclear catastrophe which would precipitate a "nuclear winter" that would cause mass extinctions and starvation as depicted by television specials like ABC's The Day After.
In the eighties and nineties it was the AIDs epidemic that was going to sweep the globe decimating the world's population. Heterosexuals as well as homosexuals were at risk and there seemed to be nothing anyone could do to avoid it.
In the 21st century we are assured that global warming is going to raise the seas and alter the earth's geography causing widespread ecological and sociological catastrophe.
To be sure the jury is still out on climate change, although it's not looking good for Al Gore's troops, but in each of the other cases, as well as several more that Prager cites, the Left's prediction turned out to be just as wrong, and just as ludicrous, as that of Rev. Camping.
Strangely, though, there was no guffawing among the media sophisticates, like there was over Camping's silly prognostication, when the Left's prophesies of impending doom failed to come to pass. Why is that?