Via the Daily Caller, a spicy hors d’oeuvre before the main course tonight in Alabama and Mississippi. You know what would have been useful here? Specifics.

Santorum: “Brian, look, I love you guys …”

Kilmeade: “No, you can feel the way you want, I’m just telling you, there’s no way I agree with that, and you’ve been on as much as anyone …”

Santorum: “I can tell you, we watch the coverage there, and look, you guys are allowed to cover what you want to cover — I can tell you we want to make sure a conservative is nominated, and we’re going to go out there and nominate on mathematics, we’re not going to focus on the process — ”

Kilmeade: “You don’t want us to add up delegates?”

Three possibilities. One: Fox is spending an undue amount of time on the delegate count, emphasizing that mathematically it’s almost impossible for Santorum to win. I haven’t watched much cable news lately but is that the sense our resident Fox-watchers get? If so, how much time is an undue amount of time? We’re more than two months past Iowa and a week removed from Super Tuesday. Time to start counting delegates, folks. Two: Maybe Santorum’s just a whiner. He’s complained before about Drudge being in the tank for Romney too, but in that case there’s at least circumstantial evidence to support it. In the case of Fox, what’s the smoking gun? Santorum was on “Hannity” just last night to dump on Bill Maher. Palin, the network’s most high profile contributor, is a Gingrich fan. Aside from the occasional Ann Coulter guest appearance, who’s supposedly shilling for Romney on FNC?

Three: Maybe he’s saying this for strategic reasons, using Fox’s “course correction” back towards the center last year to cast Romney as the choice of the Republican establishment’s favorite news network. But in that case, how to explain the trouble Romney’s had sporadically with the network?

Fox’s decision to allow Times scribe Jim Rutenberg into the building to confront the candidates in person [after a “Huckabee” candidate forum] threw campaign aides off guard, especially in the Romney camp, which went into “defensive mode immediately, insisting that the reporter stay far away,” as Rutenberg later wrote.

But the decision was just the latest example of what Fox head Roger Ailes recently called a “course correction” in an interview with Howard Kurtz of Newsweek. The Romney team’s debate-night tussle was the second embarrassing episode suffered by the candidate at the hands of Fox News in a week, after Bret Baier conducted a hard-hitting interview with Romney on November 29 that made news for several days. (After the contentious interview, Baier told Bill O’Reilly that Romney privately called his questions “overly aggressive” and “uncalled for.”)

What’s Santorum talking about? If Fox is guilty of being pro-Romney simply for calling him the presumptive frontrunner, then I’m “pro-Romney” too. And I’m not pro-Romney.