To refresh, the Minuteman Project is the activist group headed by Gilchrist. The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps are the guys led by Chris Simcox who patrol the border.

They are, apparently, also considerably less impressed with Huck’s 11th-hour immigration conversion than Gilchrist is.

Jim Gilchrist’s erstwhile Minuteman Project is itself an organization which by its own representations as a non-profit civic group cannot legally endorse candidates. It does not have any volunteers who observe illegal border activity. It has no border fence building projects. Jim Gilchrist here speaks only for Jim Gilchrist, he does not speak for the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, nor is he nationally representative of most patriots in the “Minuteman movement” – who under no circumstances could ignore the failed record nor endorse the duplicitous “plan” recently rolled out by candidate Mike Huckabee. The national media needs to recognize that Jim Gilchrist’s endorsement is his own personal statement, nothing more…

Unlike this last-minute opportunism attempted by Huckabee, many of the other GOP presidential candidates have actually helped push the issue of national border security forward for some time. Tom Tancredo’s many years of hard work on the border crisis and illegal immigration issues have all the candidates striving to sound like him. Duncan Hunter can take personal credit for getting the highly effective San Diego border fence built. Ron Paul has been to the border with us first hand and aggressively pushed positive border legislation. Alan Keyes has done more than anyone to support the organizational development of MCDC, and personally participated in the Minuteman Border Fence Groundbreaking – advancing a citizen’s construction effort which has forced Congress to finally get the Feds building physical border fence.

Their own plan? A “massive increase” in Border Patrol topped off with 25,000 National Guardsmen deployed to the border, the odds of which happening are roughly equivalent to Tancredo’s odds on winning the election. Exit question: We’re almost guaranteed a Hannity & Colmes showdown between Simcox and Gilchrist after this, right?

Update: Here’s Gilchrist explaining his endorsement, perhaps better than he even intended. He offered his help to all the candidates. Only Huck, in desperate need of immigration cred, accepted.