robertson and santorum

Sometimes our homegrown mullahs say things and then shamelessly deny that they say them, like with Pat Robertson's calm, reasoned, Christ-like suggestion that we use Special Forces to "take out" Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. His smirky denials didn't work when he inexplicably forgot that he said this all ON CAMERA on his own show. He later apologized—well, sort of—for his statements:

"I didn’t say 'assassination.’ I said our special forces should ’take him out,”’ Robertson said on his show. “’Take him out’ could be a number of things including kidnapping.” (MSNBC.com)

Or, conceivably, showing Chavez a nice evening on the town in Caracas, possibly including empanadas and a fruity drink.

The Daily Show did a great piece on this, and on Robertson's apologists' contortions, last night. See it here.

Sometimes, though, they work in the opposite direction. In response to charges by his likely 2006 opponent Bob Casey, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum insists that he has indeed "asked the tough questions" about the war in Iraq. However, as today's Philadelphia INQUIRER reports,

"Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum's office acknowledged yesterday that it cannot locate public statements of the senator questioning the Iraq war, despite the senator's claim last week that he has publicly expressed his concerns... Robert L. Traynham, Santorum's spokesman, said a search of Nexis, a news database, and the office's press clippings had not turned up any account of those comments. He noted, however, that the office's records are incomplete because the office is unable to record everything the senator says."