The Twitterverse has spoken and they believe that Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum almost called the president the N-word during a public talk Wednesday.
A handful of videos have been circulating around the Web showing Santorum addressing a crowd in Janesville, Wisconsin, for about an hour. Santorum makes—or doesn’t make—the controversial flub about halfway through his talk.
“We know the candidate Barack Obama, what he was like—the anti-war government” Santorum said in the video. He quickly stumbles over a word that is the crux of the controversy: It sounds a lot like “nig.” He continues: “America was a source for division around the world, that what we were doing was wrong.”
The clip has started a firestorm on Twitter where hundreds of people have shared the clip and called out the conservative candidate.
“It did sound as if Santorum almost called the POTUS a n*gger,” tweeted @Ms_Raine. “What other word could it have been that starts with the ‘nig’ sound?”
“I just watched this & I swear Santorum started to call Prez Obama the “N” word,” tweeted @thecitizeNY.
“We already knew Santorum is a racist, sexist, homophobic, idiotic, asshat,” tweeted @CNRush. “We aren’t surprised by him calling Obama a n_…”
Santorum and his campaign have vehemently denied that he ever said, or intended to say, the word in question.
“I looked at that
and I didn’t say that,” Santorum told Fox News Thursday. “What I started to say was a word and then it sort of changed and ‘blah’ came out. And people said I said ‘black’ and I didn’t.”
