Huckabee: The Consumate Phony

But He Isn't Alone

by Michelle Malkin

"Mike Huckabee, the soft-on-border-control ex-Arkansas governor, 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 contempt for his new bedfellows of convenience. Just two years ago, he appeared before the open-borders Hispanic group, The League of United Latin American Citizens, preaching an open-door policy. He also criticized state legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and enhanced reporting of illegal aliens as un-Christian, un-American and anti-life - not to mention "inflammatory," "race-baiting" and "demagoguery."

Just last year, Huckabee lambasted opponents of the bipartisan amnesty bill (which would've given a mass pardon to illegals) as "driven by racism or nativism." In his book released earlier this year, he called strict immigration enforcement (the kind he now supports) "sheer folly." He invited Mexico's government to establish a consulate in Arkansas so that its officials could start dispensing security-undermining "matricula consular" ID cards to illegals for banking and employment purposes.

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."

Huckabee isn't the only shameless border-control cross-dresser in the GOP field, of course. 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 a Washington Examiner interview, Giuliani now says he really, truly would have deported 400,000 illegal aliens in New York if he could have. Never mind that small matter of the lawsuit he brought against the feds to block them from enforcing immigration laws. Never mind that he was openly inviting illegal aliens into his open-borders safe harbors.

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 amnesty-bill 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."

What ALL of these pretenders have learned, is how to emulate the democrats. Core values, integrity, honor, mere fascinations that can be dispensed with in the fight for our hearts and minds.

Look, nobody's perfect. And all Conservative Republicans really want is someone with a TRUE identity, a man to grab onto a platform and stick with it. People can change their minds. Smart people do so quite often as they mature.

But only hucksters and shysters do so every day to please whatever audience is seated before them.