Wretchard said:

“Tetlock describe how pundits who find their seemingly impeccable failing can invoke the “I was almost right” defense..”

I see history as a complicated array of streamlines that often go through branch points. The branch points are singularities where history could go down one fork or another due to an infinitesimal perturbation applied at exactly the right time and place. Historical actors are people who happen to be at a branch point at the right time and place. If Julius Caesar had been born a century sooner, he might never have impacted history. However Caesar had the good fortune as a young man of surviving Lucius Cornelius Sulla (who knew the youthful Caesar was a dangerous man). Caesar was later at the right place at the right time and changed the course of history. B. Hussein might be a historical actor who will push us down the wrong fork of history. Then again, Hussein might be a someone like Clement Vallandigham (google him), a very dangerous man who never amounted to anything.