Santorum: I Didn't Drop N-Bomb on Obama

Blogs were all a-buzz yesterday that Rick Santorum may have nearly called President Obama the N-word, RawStory reports. Addressing voters in Janesville, Wisconsin, earlier this week, the candidate stopped just short of using America's most incendiary insult: “We know the candidate Barack Obama, what he was like—the anti-war government nig… America was a source for division around the world, that what we were doing was wrong." See the video here; Santorum's stumble comes around the 34:30 mark.

“Oh, come on!” cried a Santorum spokesman when asked about the flub. “Give me a break. That’s unbelievable. What does it say about those that are running with this story that that’s where their mind goes." But RawStory notes that earlier this year, Santorum did say he would not "make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money"—then later claimed he had started to say another word and ended up saying "blah," not "black." But Santorum hasn't retracted a more bizarre 2012 statement: that Obama, as a black man, shouldn't support abortion rights. (More Rick Santorum 2012 stories.)