What if your presidential aspirations ended with a bang and a whimper.

Republicans were abuzz yesterday over Matt Drudge’s bombshell teaser that Sean Hannity (who else?) would reveal that evening a video that would bring down the Obama presidency.

Uh huh.

Big surprise, it didn’t. It was an already-seen video of Obama giving a speech about how the federal government abandoning black communities during the Katrina disaster. Does Mitt Romney really want to be on the “other” side of that argument – arguing that the federal government did a “heck of a job” responding to Katrina? Doubtful.

The video debacle made Republicans look even more desperate than they already were. And as Buzzfeed reports, a number of Republican strategists are less than thrilled that yet another Hail Mary in which the Romney campaign and its supporters are desperately trying to grab on to any “gotcha!” they can, rather than a cogent argument for why Mitt Romney would make a better president than Barack Obama.

Team Romney, however, refused to distance themselves from the video.

Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades’ reported longstanding relationship to the Drudge Report prompted an almost universal early assumption that the campaign had been the video’s source, but Romney aides quickly denied involvement in seeding the video last night. They would not, however, publically distance themselves from it either.

“Voters have make that up,” Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden said on CBS This Morning. “They have to look at that video and have to make up their mind on that individually. I think what’s much more important to this debate right now are the president’s policies — the president’s record over the last four years.”

And finally a word about Hannity. Fox News’ embrace of disinformation is well-documented, but Hannity puts Fox to shame. I debated the man once on Paul Zahn’s old show, and his only real argument, on any issue, was an endliess scream. The man yells. Nonstop. Over you. Until the clock runs out. So it’s no surprise that Hannity was the guy pumping this OHMYGODYOUGOTTASEEIT video. There was no “there, there,” because there rarely is.