Bloggers to the Rescue of Santorum

Now that he's had time to read the blogs of his apologists review the video, Rick Santorum's memory has returned... sort of.

I’ve looked at that quote, in fact I looked at the video. In fact, I’m pretty confident I didn’t say black. I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — mumbled it and sort of changed my thought.

The questions:

1. Why did it take Santorum so long to figure out that he didn't say "black"?

2. If Santorum didn't mean "black", what word did he have in mind? (Palestinian?)

3. If he didn't mean to use a word, from what I've seen, Santorum's verbalized pause of choice is "Um". Can he point to another example from his speeches where a verbalized pause has sounded like "bla...ah" or something similar?

4. Why did Santorum even need to check - why did he offer a nonsensical excuse¹ about having recently watched "Waiting for Superman" rather than expressing, "That's ridiculous - I would never say such a thing."?

I don't think Santorum can be taken seriously as a candidate, so I don't want to give undue focus to a slip of his tongue, but here's the deal: The media should be asking him to explain his weak follow-up.

What if the shoe were on the other foot - not about something caught on tape, but about rumors of something inflammatory on a videotape that nobody could produce? I'll give Geraldo Rivera credit here,

But if a malicious rumor about a candidate's spouse got that much attention, why not press Santorum for a better explanation?²
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1. In the video linked above, Santorum states,

"I've seen that quote and I haven't seen the context in which that was made. And yesterday I talked for example about a movie called, um, what was it, 'Waiting for Superman', which was about black children, and so I don't know whether it was response and I was talking after talking about that, so let just me say, no matter what, I want to make every lives [sic] better...."

2. The Obama campaign was able to respond, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word".