With these bizarre statements by two establishment insiders one can understand why the blogs are buzzing with rumor and innuendo. Many are wondering if we are getting advance warnings about another 9/11 or perhaps a global financial meltdown?

The comment about testing the mettle of Obama came from future VP and "War on Terror" snake-oil salesman Joe Biden, who neglected to say how this "crisis" will test him in his role as future VP. Here's his comment at an October 19, 2008, 25K, Seattle fundraiser:

"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

You must read this transcript to get the full nebulous scope of the crisis coming our way. Biden, the consummate political insider, knows some "generated" crisis is coming and he implores the audience to just go along with the unpopular decisions that Obama (and he) will have to make:

"I've forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know, so I'm not being falsely humble with you. I think I can be value added, but this guy has it. This guy has it. But he's gonna need your help. Because I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going 'oh my God, why are they there in the polls, why is the polling so down, why is this thing so tough? We're gonna have to make some incredibly tough decisions in the first two years. So I'm asking you now, I'm asking you now, be prepared to stick with us. Remember the faith you had at this point because you're going to have to reinforce us."

This call to faith gets even stranger when Biden gets biblical with a strange reference to Obama as a messiah figure: "Let's not be, for those of a different faith remember St. Peter denied Christ thrice, you know? We don't need anybody denying us, this is gonna be tough."

No denying that Joe catches himself and admits he said too much. "I probably shouldn't have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here."

Say it ain't so, Joe.

On the same day that Biden made his ominous forecast, Colin Powell also claimed on Meet the Press that a "crisis" is on the way and even gave specific dates: January 21st or 22nd of 2009, the day after the Bush administration is scheduled to leave the White House.

Powell: "I would start with talking to the American people and talking to the world, and conveying a new image of American leadership, a new image of America’s role in the world.

The problems will always be there, and there’s going to be a crisis come along in the 21st or 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now." Meet the Press transcript

What's is more telling about these comments is not immediately obvious to the causal observer: it is not the debate about whether or not Powell and Biden have committed Fraudian slips, or were trying to warn the American people about some new imminent attack -- both Biden and Powell have resigned themselves to this inevitability and have accepted it because it is being dictated by more powerful people than themselves, people they work for who are entrenched in the top echelons of the state. The real message is that Obama will be tested to see if he will uphold the mandates of this elite while mollifying the mob.

Contrary to popular opinion, the President of the United States of America does not actually run the state on its deepest level, which would explain why no major contender for the presidency would ever seriously look into 9/11 or, most recently, challenge the 800 billion dollar bankers bail out. To do so would be political suicide.

In Peter Dale Scott latest book "The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America," he writes of a cabal which he collectively terms the "deep state," which is highly secretive and has increasingly committed itself to global dominance at any price. State department officials and even Presidents have been powerless to stop these covert operatives as they are entrenched in the most powerful segments of the state, and, according to Scott, their career success is based on their commitment to worst-case scenarios, or a "paranoid style in American politics." He argues that the paranoid bureaucratic style of the deep state, undisciplined by the wisdom of the public state, was a major cause of 9/11 and is a formula for more 9/11s. It helped create al Qaeda and the circumstances which unleashed al Qaeda against the United States.

Scott continues: "I have observed that bureaucratic debate where power is involved tends to favor paranoid or worst-case analyses, especially those that justify budget and bureaucratic growth. Today's bureaucratic paranoia has indeed been institutionalized by what has been popularized as Vice President Cheney's "one percent doctrine": "Even if there's a just a one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty....This doctrine is a license for untrammeled expansion of the secret deep state."

This one percent doctrine has allowed the deep state to become even more powerful and secretive and it has used fear and threats to get its way time and time again. It can certainly use the universal boogieman al Qaeda, a global financial crisis, or a plague to expand it's empire even further. With Obama's presidency the deep state may have bought itself more time and the legitimacy it sorely needed. Although the Bush administration allowed this cabal to expand dramatically in the last 8 years, today Bush's unpopularity is a liability for them. A fresh, popular, messiah-type figure that Americans trust is a perfect foil for the real operatives that run the government.

So, what is this crisis that Obama is going to be tested on? Will he be expected to calm the world down after some devastating plague breaks out? Will he be expected to look sincerely and passionately in the camera to implore the citizens of the world that their best hope for survival is to take the government's new vaccine? Will he sign the executive order calling for mass quarantining of people in Halliburton prison camps? Will he go along with the Pentagon and declare martial law when massive protests erupt on the streets over Israel's preemptive nuclear attack on Iran, or a massive run on the banks? Will he utilize Blackwater and other military contractors to subdue the citizenry in the event of a natural or man-made disaster like New Orleans after Katrina? And, most importantly, will he ignore the real culprits of a major crime for his own political expediency?

This last one will tell more about his character than anything else.