I promised you a tantrum. Via Mediaite, here it is. It’s interesting to see what gets The One’s dander up, and what doesn’t:

Obama showed the passion and anger at his personal defeat that he wasn’t able to manage after the Benghazi slaughter. — DepressiveBlogger69 (@AceofSpadesHQ) April 17, 2013

Never mind Benghazi. Where was this supposedly righteous anger after Aurora? The victims in that case weren’t small children, but that can’t possibly explain O’s dramatically more subdued reaction after that shooting. They were innocent people too; many of them were young, if not kindergarteners. No angry Rose Garden press conferences freaking out about Senate inaction after Aurora, though. Any theories why? Anything, maybe, having to do with when that shooting happened vis-a-vis Newtown? Right: One of them came three months before a presidential election and the other came a month after. That’s the difference. As you watch him point the finger here at supposedly gutless senators who care more about retaining public office than Doing Something, remember that there’s hardly one among them who’s as attuned to political self-preservation as O. He kept his mouth shut nice and tight about guns when it was his own ass on the line last year in purple states; he ignored gun control almost completely when he had 60 Democratic votes in the Senate early in his first term; and as we know from the gay-marriage farce, he isn’t above lying outright to voters about his true positions in the name of getting elected. (Let’s not start on the many ways he’s followed Bush’s counterterrorism lead after selling himself to the left in ’08 as the anti-Bush on foreign policy.)

Given his record, there’s every reason to believe that what’s really bothering him is the fact that red-state Dems denied him an easy chance today to demagogue Republicans as the party of child murder or whatever, which he was hoping to use next year as a way to retake the House. Then, once he had a Democratic Congress again, he could pass some new horrible permutation of ObamaCare or immigration or the minimum wage or some other liberal wishlist item that has nothing to do with gun control. Just like in his first term! That’s what he’s mad about, that a political bludgeon was essentially taken out of his hands before he had a chance to use it to achieve unrelated goals. Says Rick Wilson:

And by the way, gun control fans…Obama isn’t angry because you lost. He’s angry because he couldn’t move numbers. — Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 17, 2013

And now he’s a lame duck, with few opportunities to pass something big and a real chance that he’ll end up with a fully Republican Congress in 2015. He might have no choice at this point but to try to tank the immigration bill too so that he’s got something to scream about next year. I wonder if Democrats will trip him up there too.

Here’s the transcript, in case you care.