Screenshot from the iPad App: Monty Python: The Holy Book of Days about The Holy Grail
itunes.apple.com/us/app/monty-python-holy-book-days/id503…
Referring to this, if you hadn’t heard:
Santorum was speaking at a rally in Janesville, Wisconsin, still locked in the ferocious nomination battle with Mitt Romney and still desperate to become the true conservative standard-bearer of the Republican party.
“We know the candidate Barack Obama, what he was like – the anti-war government nig …” he seems to say, then suddenly stopping, and changing tack to add: “America was a source for division around the world, that what we were doing was wrong.“
It is hard to think of exactly what word Santorum was about to use. What word beginning with “nig-” comes naturally after government? It has been suggested he was trying to say “-nik”, as in peacenik or beatnik. That is possible. Or perhaps, it was some non-specific verbal tic: a random vowel-consonent flub.
Here, Santorum has previous form. In Iowa, he stumbled when discussing conservative opposition to welfare programmes:
“I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
In the face of later outrage at singling out black Americans, he insisted that he had not said “black”, but instead vocalised “bleugh”, as his mind became confused over his own train of thought. Believe that? Judge for yourself here.