I never expected to ever say, "Poor Ann Coulter." But - poor Ann Coulter. I really feel badly for her, in a manner of speaking. But not for the reason you think. Not because Barack Obama was re-elected President of the United States. Rather, I feel bad for her because of her responsibility in that victory.
Remember the famous video where Ms. Coulter says, "If Chris Christie doesn't run we'll nominate Mitt Romney and we will lose"?
Now, I'm sure that many people, Ann Coulter included, think that this statement was prescient and shows her to be oh-so wise in her election prediction. Except that it doesn't. It shows her culpability.
Mitt Romney probably came closer to winning the presidency than any Republican could have this election. If Chris Christie ran, he could never have gotten the Republican nomination in this Republican atmosphere -- compared to today's radical far right, Chris Christie is a moderate. That wasn't going to fly with today's Republican electorate. So, Chris Christie wasn't getting the GOP nomination if he ran, despite whatever the weeping Ann Coulter postured.
However, what Ann Coulter did do was help build up the pedestal of Chris Christie among Republicans who didn't really know him. She helped make Chris Christie seem to Republicans that he was The Republican Savior. She helped make Chris Christie's voice so deeply important to Republicans that he became the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention.
So, when it turned out that Chris Christie wasn't exactly what Ann Coulter suggested he was, nor what she tried to get Republicans to believe, and Chris Christie then publicly and repeatedly and powerfully embraced the strong leadership of President Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, it made Gov. Christie's actions all the more significant to voters.
Ann Coulter was not prescient in her election prediction. Ann Coulter helped in her own inimitable, thoughtless, empty, soulless way to help get Barack Obama elected. She created her own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Poor Ann Coulter. She must be so pissed off. The heart bleeds.
Mitch McConnell must be so pissed off, too. After doing one of the most irresponsible things any Senate party leader has ever done by declaring that his Number One priority was not working to help America but rather to make sure that Barack Obama wasn't re-elected, he spent four years shirking his sworn duties and working instead to defeat the president. And after all of that effort, he wasn't able to do it. Despite his great efforts of his Number One priority, President Barack Obama was re-elected. Mitch McConnell must be so pissed off.
In fact, the whole Republican Senate must be so pissed off. When President Obama nominated Elizabeth Warren to be head of the Consumer Protection Agency, an important but reasonably piddly bureau, GOP senators fought her with the fervor of missionary crusaders and wouldn't approve her for the job. And so, what Elizabeth Warren did next was announce her candidacy for the Senate in Massachusetts. If the Republican senators had simply approved Elizabeth Warren to head a simple bureaucratic job, she never would have run for the Senate, and Republican Scott Brown would have been re-elected. Republican senators must be so pissed off. Your heart really goes out to them. In a manner of speaking.
And I know that Donald Trump is pissed off. After gathering all this evidence that Barack Obama wasn't born in America and never showing it to anyone, and then having Mr. Obama re-elected to office anyway, it must be so galling to him.
Imagine how pissed off Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson must be, having spent all that money to defeat Barack Obama -- hundreds of millions of dollars -- and having absolutely nothing to show for it. I spent ten bucks yesterday for lunch, and at least I got a sandwich and bowl of soup.
All those people who'd been slamming Nate Silver must be incredibly pissed off seeing how remarkably accurate he was with his statistics. Again.
Paul Ryan must be really pissed off, too. He had been a Rising Star Congressman in the Republican Party, and now he's a losing vice-presidential candidate -- only one of whom has been elected president in 172 years. That must sting.
I suspect that Mitt Romney might be pissed off, though I've never quite had any idea how or what he feels about anything. For all I know, he's just glad that he never had to reveal what was in his tax returns.
Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock must be so pissed off at opening their mouths.
But most of all, I suspect that the election results must be other-world mortifying to those radical far right Republicans who are so pissed off that everything they stand for has been repudiated. In a terrible economy, with 7.9 unemployment, a $16 trillion national debt and a $1 trillion budget deficit, Barack Obama still beat Republicans and won re-election. After lambasting Barack Obama for four years as a Socialist, Nazi, Muslim, terrorist Kenyan; calling him "retarded," "lazy" and "stupid;" using racist innuendos to surreptitiously demean him, and making defeating him the Number One priority for four years, the Republican Party still couldn't defeat Barack Obama. After all this, after all they've been doing for four years to enrage the American public... the American public wasn't enraged. In fact, for all that, the mere fact that Barack Obama actually got re-elected President of the United States is one of the more remarkable victories and testaments of support (and renunciation of conservative agendas) as we've seen in America.
And we haven't even touched on Claire McCaskill, Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Tim Kaine and the rest of the Democratic and progressive agenda victories, all of which point strongly to a rejection of the far right social agenda and support of the president's leadership. Well, I guess that affordable health care won't be dismantled now, the day after inauguration...
The radical far right must be so pissed off. But they only have themselves to blame. Because they've built this rejected, Tea Party-ish bed for eight years.
The rest of American -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- they see this as democracy. The way America goes. Differences of opinions, different issues, and you accept it and move on.
Forward.
But mainly, Ann Coulter must be really pissed off.