Repeat What I Meant, Not What I Said

New York's mayor went on tv and declared he couldn't understand why cops don't go out on strike to demand tighter gun control laws:

“I don’t understand why the police officers across his country don’t stand up collectively and say, ‘We’re going to go on strike. We're not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what's required to keep us safe,” Bloomberg said Monday on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” as part of his ramped-up campaign against illegal guns in the wake of the Colorado theater massacre.

Of course, a lot of people thought this was an idiotic proposal. So the next day he tried to rewind that that suggestion:

“I didn’t mean literally go on strike. In fact, in New York, they can’t go on strike. There’s a law against it."

That thing I said? I didn't mean that. Somebody else repeated it!

They repeated it word for word,
and somehow it sounded absurd.