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Every Democrat running for
president thinks anti-illegal immigration activists are all racists and
xenophobes. Do we really need a Republican nominee for president who thinks
the same way?
Men, stripped down to their underwear, walk back into Mexico
across the Rio Grande river separating the U.S. and Mexico in Laredo, Texas
in this May 2, 2006 file photo. Carrying their clothes in plastic bags the men
were trying to swim into the U.S. when they spotted the U.S. Border Patrol
watching them and then turned back. Hundreds of illegal aliens cross the
river each day trying to sneak into the U.S.
Breakout GOP candidate Mike
Huckabee, the soft-on-border control former governor of Arkansas, scored a
jaw-dropping endorsement Tuesday from Jim Gilchrist, founder of the
Minuteman Project. Despite a long gubernatorial record opposing employer
sanctions and pushing tax-subsidized illegal alien education benefits,
Huckabee won Gilchrist's support by unveiling a last-minute, tough-sounding
homeland security plan.
Trouble is, Huckabee has
downright and longstanding contempt for his new bedfellows of convenience.
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."
Just last year, Huckabee
lambasted opponents of the bipartisan shamnesty bill providing a mass
pardon to illegal aliens as "driven by racism or nativism." He
called strict immigration enforcement -- the kind he now supports --
"sheer folly" in his campaign-timed book released earlier this
year. He actively invited the Mexican government to establish a consulate
in Arkansas -- giving its office a $1 per year special office space rate --
so that its foreign officials could start dispensing security-undermining
matricula consular ID cards to illegal aliens for banking and employment
purposes. And he's not only for government in-state illegal alien
discounts, he's for expanding them far beyond what the federal DREAM Act
proposed.
But now that he needs to
establish his border control bona fides, Huckabee is all honey.
"Frankly, Jim," he said to the Minuteman Project founder at a
press conference in Iowa on Tuesday, "I've got to tell you there were
times in the early days of the Minutemen I thought, 'What are these guys
doing, what are they about?' I confess I owe you an apology
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