Benjy Sarlin February 22, 2012, 8:51 PM

In the CNN debate Wednesday Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney mixed it up over earmarks, with Santorum accusing Romney of hypocrisy for attacking his own budget items while requesting the same federal dollars himself.

Santorum defended earmark spending in general, saying he was proud to support projects that Congress deemed were important when the White House disagreed. But he said Romney had no grounds to attack him at all given that the Olympics requested and received federal dollars through the same process while Romney was running the 2002 games.

“Governor Romney asked for that earmark, that’s the point here,” he said. “He’s out on television ads right now unfortunately attacking me for saying that I’m this great earmarker when he not only asked for earmarks for the Salt Lake Olympics in the order of tens of millions of dollars… he did as the governor of Massachusetts, $300 million or $400 million.”

Santorum’s defense of earmarks drew silence and sometime scattered boos from the crowd, but Romney appeared visibly annoyed with the argument and at times prickly.

“I didn’t follow all of that,” Romney said after a Santorum answer, “but I can tell you this. I would put a ban on earmarks.”

Dragging in another rival, Santorum went on to call Ron Paul “one of the most prolific earmarkers today” while defending his own behavior as aboveboard and common for lawmakers.

Newt Gingrich sided with Santorum on the hypocrisy angle, saying that he supported federal help for the Olympics as well and felt Romney was wrong to pick and choose which earmarks to criticize.

” I think it was totally appropriate for you to ask for what you got,” Gingrich said to Romney. “I think it’s kind of silly for you to turn around and run an ad attacking for somebody else claiming that what you got was right and what they got was wrong.”

Watch:

2012, 2012 presidential primaries, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul