Who's Sorry Now? Oh, Puhleeze!

Anti-immigration "Minutemen" founder Jim Gilchrist laments the possibility of violence in the movement he helped to create.

"Today, Gilchrist is worried that a few self-proclaimed patriots might be carrying a gun.

"After seeing online videos that encouraged border violence amid calls to crack down on illegal immigration, the 59-year-old Aliso Viejo resident said he feels responsible for what started out as a publicity campaign and has since fallen prey to internal divisions and to influence by people he believed had 'Saddam Hussein mentalities.'

"'In retrospect, had I seen this, had I had a crystal ball to see what is going to happen… Am I happy? No,' Gilchrist said in a phone conversation late last week. Am I happy at the outcome of this whole movement? I am very, very sad, very disappointed.'"

Oh well duh. Sorry, but there's no way on earth I believe he didn't see the possibility of violence. I mean, words like "invasion" don't exactly conjure rose petals--oh. Er. Unless you're name is Rumsfeld. Maybe Gilchrist was just following his Fuhrer? Consider:

'"It's an 'invasion'," Gilchrist said of illegal immigration across the border between the United States and Mexico, "but it's not a war. It is a covert 'Trojan Horse invasion'."

"That's a marked difference from the Gilchrist who led supporters on a caravan across the country two years ago to President Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX, shouting at critics before leaving from Los Angeles: 'Minutemen, stand your ground!. . . If it's a war he wants, then let it begin here.'"

"The year before, just back from the border trip, he told a group of 150 supporters at an anti-illegal immigration group meeting: 'I'm damned proud to be a vigilante.'

"Last year, a coalition of human rights and labor groups labeled Gilchrist a 'voice of intolerance' in the debate over immigration reform. In 2005, the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center reported that neo-Nazis had joined the border-watching event led by Gilchrist."

He can't go around carelessly spewing words like "war" and "vigilante" and "invasion" about brown-skin Mexican immigrants without expecting, if not inviting, militant neo-Nazi types to join his little tea party.

Gilchrist is he who waged an internal war with our own Chris Simcox over control of the Minuteman Project. Sorry, but he can't now divorce himself from the consequences of his deliberate racist organizing. He built it, he owns it.