Gilchrist, Huckabee and the Minutemen

Yesterday, Jim Gilchrist, founder and head of the Minutemen, endorsed Mike Huckabee for President.

In Iowa today, former Arkansas Governor and Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee received a major endorsement from Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project. Huckabee said he was honored to receive the endorsement.

“No one can question Jim's commitment to this country and the immigration problem. He has mobilized a group of volunteers to go to the border and draw attention to the issue of immigration. All of us want a policy where people come to this country through the front door, not the back door,” said Huckabee during a morning news conference. Gilchrist added,

"Governor Huckabee actually wrote a plan that I can embrace. I found his ‘Secure America’ plan would open the dialogue and help begin the process of solving the illegal immigration problem.”

This immediately raised the eyebrows of illegal immigration hawk, Michelle Malkin.

Yeah, you read it right–the founder of the border control group, the Minuteman Project, is endorsing open-borders-turned-expedient enforcement convert GOP candidate Mike Huckabee:

...

Huckabee called the endorsement “providential.” I know many grass-roots immigration enforcement supporters will have far less kind words than that.

Michelle has recently become so critical of every politician's stance vis a vis illegal immigration that I frankly beginning to believe that it is now simply to the point of being unreasonable and unrealistic.

Just two years ago, Huckabee appeared before the open-borders Hispanic group,
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), preaching an open-door
policy. According to the Arkansas
News Bureau, Huckabee also criticized state legislation requiring proof of
citizenship to register to vote and enhanced reporting of illegal aliens as
un-Christian, un-American, irresponsible and anti-life — not to mention
“inflammatory,” “race-baiting” and “demagoguery.”

...

Bringing up the false convert rear is Sen. John McCain. Earlier this year, he was the
most vocal critic of grass-roots conservatives who mobilized against the amnesty bill. He now says he has learned his lesson and supports securing the border. He has learned nothing. During the shamnesty debacle, he called Rush Limbaugh a “nativist;” over the weekend, he repeated such contemptuous “straight talk” at the Univision debate by assailing what he called anti-Hispanic rhetoric. In an interview with the New Yorker, he irritatedly dismissed immigration concerns in Iowa as marginal and irrational — just a bunch of “senior citizens” in Iowa caught up in the
“emotion” of a cultural assault.

...

Rudy “I supported sanctuary policies before I was against them, but my sanctuary policy wasn’t really a sanctuary policy, anyway” Giuliani now quotes “the advice of a
great man, Father Hesburgh, who said, ‘We must close the back door of illegal immigration in order to preserve the front door of legal immigration.’” In an interview with Washington Examiner reporter and author Bill Sammon, Giuliani now says he really, truly would have deported 400,000 illegal aliens in New York if he could have...

Well, I knew the campaign season was in full swing when I received this on my email...

For the sake of clarity, it is important to note that the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), the nation's largest Minuteman organization, is a 501(C)4 non-profit organization and cannot and does not endorse any candidate for public office. MCDC is not associated with Mr. Jim Gilchrist, who today endorsed Mike Huckabee for president.

Jim Gilchrist’s erstwhile Minuteman Project is itself an organization which by its own representations as a non-profit civic group cannot legally endorse candidates. It does not have any volunteers who observe illegal border activity. It has no border fence building projects. Jim Gilchrist here speaks only for Jim Gilchrist, he does not speak for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, nor is he nationally representative of most patriots in the "Minuteman movement" – who under no circumstances could ignore the failed record nor endorse the duplicitous “plan” recently rolled out by candidate Mike Huckabee. The national media needs to recognize that Jim Gilchrist’s endorsement is his own personal statement, nothing more.

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps emphasizes policy dealing with national border security. The only "plan" to ensure border security that is acceptable to our constituency would be a candidate policy statement declaring that his first act as President will be to hold a press conference and announce to the American people an executive order to immediately deploy and fund 30,000 National Guard personnel to the U.S. Borders (25,000 to the southern border and 5,000 to the northern border) to complement a massive increase in U.S. Border Patrol Agent field personnel, and a bilateral effort to secure our frontiers, smash the drug cartels, shut down the human smugglers and protect the public safety of the citizens who reside along the borders on both sides of our national boundaries.

Unlike this last-minute opportunism attempted by Huckabee, many of the other GOP presidential candidates have actually helped push the issue of national border security forward for some time. Tom Tancredo’s many years of hard work on the border crisis and illegal immigration issues have all the candidates striving to sound like him. Duncan Hunter can take personal credit for getting the highly effective San Diego border fence built. Ron Paul has been to the border with us first hand and aggressively pushed positive border legislation. Alan Keyes has done more than anyone to support the organizational development of MCDC, and personally participated in the Minuteman Border Fence Groundbreaking – advancing a citizen’s construction effort which has forced Congress to finally get the Feds building physical border fence.

Only one Minuteman group is conducting regular multi-state border security efforts, building fence and aggressively monitoring Washington DC: Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. We would like to extend an invitation to all the presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat, to come to the border and see what is really happening on our nation’s frontier. Not to take the safe little government photo-op helicopter ride, but see the lay-up sites full of trash and debris. See the rape trees. See the violent crime in the border towns. Walk on the pathways of destroyed environmental terrain trampled by tens of thousands of invading foreign migrants. See what the American elites’ support of broken borders, unfettered illegal immigration and sanctuary cities is doing to our fellow Americans who live on our borderlands, and how these failed policies imperil our nation’s safety, security and prosperity.

With your support MCDC continues to make Border Security and Illegal
Immigration a national priority that must be resolved. Now more than ever we
need your help to continue the fight.

Now, I have long been of the opinion that this hyperanalyzing of people's records is useless and misleading. There is no way to govern for any extended period of time without having plenty to criticize on plenty of issues if your record is dissected enough. I am skeptical of Michelle's and others intense and harsh criticism of Huckabee's record, however I do believe everyone should see this email.