Malkin is gob-smacked. Larison is slack-jawed:
I can't express to you all how little sense this makes. It's baffling, like so much else associated with Mike Huckabee lately. The only thing more bizarre would have been if Gilchrist had endorsed McCain. How does the founder of the Minutemen endorse Huckabee? What parallel universe have we fallen into that this is happening? I mean, Gilchrist essentially has to ignore everything that the man said or did regarding immigration for the last decade. Apparently the take-away lesson is that shameless pandering works. Before much longer maybe Huckabee will land Tancredo's endorsement.
I think Larison and Malkin are missing something about the base and Huckabee: he is one of them. If shameless pandering were enough, Romney would be walking away with this. Paranoid Christianists care more about knowing that their candidate gets them than his past record on "the issues." And if he is one of them, he can be brought around, as Huckabee has on immigration. What matters is cultural and religious identity, rather than policy. Again this is a result of the sectarianization of Republican politics.