I was worried for a while about Pat Robertson. As far as I knew he had not uttered a statement on the Newtown shootings, and that was so unlike him. He had also recently been expressing some strangely sensible sentiments on subjects like marijuana and science, and I wondered whether he had seen the light of reason or whether those were momentary brain lapses and that he had since gone back to his old ways of seeing a smiting god everywhere, similar to what he said about the events of 9/11 and hurricane Katrina.

After all, Robertson does not spare schools from god’s wrath. When the policy of teaching intelligent design in the Dover, PA school district was overturned by the courts in 2005, Robertson warned that if disaster struck those schools later, they shouldn’t go whining to god for help after they had kicked him out, so he is not above ascribing school tragedies to god.

But I needn’t have worried. It turns out that the reason Robertson has been silent on the shootings is that he has been busy giving out romantic advice and it looks like he is as crazy as ever. Even his co-host seems to be stunned and embarrassed by his comments. Welcome back, Pat!

(This clip appeared on January 16, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)