Beyond the Norris Ad

My last post on Mike Huckabee, praising him for his hilarious Chuck Norris campaign ad, was a bit of a backhanded compliment. For this statement on illegal immigration, however, I give him genuine props:

"We penalize law-breakers. We don't penalize their children for something they can't help.

"If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he's on the hospital steps, what do the other candidates suggest we do, let him sit there and gasp until he doesn't have any air left and he dies? If a child comes to our school -- and our law, by the way, in most of our states, mine certainly says you've got to educate a child if he's of child age -- what do you, break your own law and say, `No, you can't come in the schoolhouse door'?

"No, you don't do that. What you do is you elect a president who will fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don't then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That's not what this country does. We're a better country than that."

I'm really starting to feel hopeful that the anti-immigration wave has crested (without, amazingly enough, doing any lasting damage). Hopefully, Huckabee's stance is a sign that even within the GOP, there will be a push back against the extremist Tancredo wing on this issue.

But even still, make no mistake. Huckabee's got the right position on this issue, but it's not an easy one to take in the Republican primary -- particularly when he's finally starting to show some life in the polls. I give him serious kudos for taking it.