Duncan Hunter FR Exclusive: On Gunny Pop, Chuck DeVore, Car Bombers, Anchor Babies and more!!

This interview is part of an ongoing series of conversations with former Congressman and conservative activist Duncan Hunter. The intent is to keep this rock ribbed conservative’s ideas in the public square which will hopefully help guide his former colleagues still in office, as well as inspire the American people to embrace his Reaganesque views on American politics. With any luck, Hunter will seek the presidency again in 2012, but for now he is concentrating on helping the GOP regain the majority in the House by supporting a lineup of like-minded, young conservatives running for seats currently held by liberal Democrats. This interview finds Hunter on the road from San Diego to Brawley, CA, on his way to a political event for Nick ‘Gunny Pop’ Popaditch.

AJM: Well, what I’d like to start off with is something we talked about briefly the other day, and that is your son Duncan getting hammered from the leftists and the media as well as some of the GOP open borders lobby for standing his ground on not only supporting the Arizona’s new immigration law but also his comments regarding so called ‘anchor babies’. I wanted your take on this.

DH: The anchor baby question is the perfect question for the lefties; it’s the “have you stopped beating your wife” question.

DH: If you answer “yes” to the question then you are not for enforcing immigration law because you would never ‘want to take an infant away from its mother’. And if you say “no”, to that question then you are, obviously, a ‘very cruel, racist person’ in terms of not letting them stay in the United States. So it’s a question for which lefties, I’m sure, love to propound; but the question back to them is: Well, what’s your answer?

If you don’t have some device that goes toward ensuring that people can’t game the system, manipulate the system by coming over immediately before they have a child, having the child, then utilizing that child to neutralize their illegal crossing, then you simply have a system in which immigration law is manipulated by people and that’s not something that we can tolerate.

So it’s the perfect ‘have you stopped beating your wife question’. It’s too bad.

It’s also interesting; Duncan, like I do, supports the concept of the Arizona law. I haven’t read the law itself yet, and I actually like to read the law itself before I give a definitive take on it, but in many other areas of law, the States mirror federal law and support and cooperate with federal enforcement agencies. If this was in any area OTHER than immigration it wouldn’t have drawn as much as a yawn from the open borders crowd.

AJM: Yep, I think you’re absolutely right. So how is Duncan D. holding up under fire? He seems to be holding his own.

DH: Oh, he’s fine, absolutely. He’s doing great. In fact I came back to Washington for a funeral a couple of days ago for an old friend who had passed away – a great fighter pilot – and Duncan called me to tell me he had just won the Congressional Trap and Skeet Shooting competition between the Republicans and the Democrats. And he happily reminded me that that was something I had never done.

So he’s doing fine and working hard and working lots of defense issues. As you know he’s on the Armed Services Committee.

His main issue on the immigration front is enforcing the border. The so-called anchor baby law is Brian Bilbray’s baby, which Dunc cosponsored.

DH: Yeah. But the emphasis of that by some conservatives is, I think, a function of the frustration that the American people have in terms of not having an enforceable border. If we had an enforceable border, that would be much less of an issue right now.

DH: It would solve most of the problems. If people couldn’t get across illegally, you wouldn’t have to worry about that. I think the lack of secure borders reflects a lot of things. I think the Arizona law is a function of that frustration.

AJM: That’s true, but like we talked about before, it basically mimics federal law – namely, you cannot be here if you are an illegal – and that’s why the liberals are pulling their hair out. I say “good for Arizona”, and I hope it is copied elsewhere.

DH: Yeah, it should. But once again, if you had an enforceable border, a real fence-enforced border, Arizona wouldn’t have to come up with its own way of dealing with the hordes that are here illegally. Look, all these things that we are doing right now, almost all of them are a result of our dysfunctional border. With an enforceable border, you wouldn’t have the problem of having to enforce employer sanctions; you wouldn’t have the problems of massive social costs – schools, hospitals, etc. – and the criminal justice costs we are now seeing.

AJM: Oh, absolutely. That’s the number one priority. And you’ve been working that angle for 25 years. But there is another portion of this, of people who come over legally with green cards or visas and what have you, and they overstay their allotted time, and those people need to be shown the door as well.

AJM: So I think the Arizona law kind of takes care of both scenarios. But obviously the open borders down there is the driving problem.

AJM: I’d like to switch over to Florida, where I’m sure you heard by now that liberal governor Charlie Crist did what liberals tend to do when they are getting beaten by a conservative in a primary. That is, he jumped over to an independent, and he’s going to run as an independent. Have you heard that?

DH: No. But I’m glad to hear that from you. It’s always good to talk to you because I get a lot of bad news (laughs).

DH: Hold on one second, I’ve got a catch in my throat here. I’ll be back on the line so hold on.

DH: No, I knew he was making noises about it, but I hadn’t heard he absolutely changed parties.

AJM: Yeah, he went independent; I think it was last Thursday. He officially announced it. Like you said, he’d been hinting at it for awhile. So now, of course, it’s going to be a dogfight to see who wins that race. But I guess its one of the consequences of having that type of Republican in the party; they’ll stab you in the back when they get a chance.

DH: Yeah, that’s too bad. A divided congress is the order of the day and we have to do everything we can to keep this from happening. But sometimes it happens. Usually a function of egos.

AJM: Absolutely. But I think old Rubio still has a decent shot at it. We might be OK. The Tea Parties are all behind Rubio.

AJM: This is my last question on politics, or I should say political races here. Are you planning to come out and endorse Chuck DeVore in the senate race in California there?

DH: You know, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t got involved in that race and haven’t endorsed anybody yet. But I really like DeVore and I got a call from the LA Times about him, about his work on the Israeli missile defense system, or the mid range missile defense systems that we started up in the 1980s. That led to the development of the Arrow defense system that is capable of taking down SCUD missiles and similar types of ballistic missiles. DeVore worked on that with us, and I appreciated that. I thought it was a great contribution to national security.

I did an interview on Chuck with the LA Times here, oh it must have been a couple of days ago. Did you see anything on that?

AJM: Right now, he’s got a few, good, solid folks like Jim DeMint and Jim Inhofe endorsing him, but the party, as usual, is endorsing the more ‘moderate’ Fiorina. And it’s going to be a dog fight, so he could use all the help he can get. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear your words of encouragement.

DH: Well listen, you can give money again to another good candidate. Right now we’re driving out do this thing for Nick Popaditch here in Imperial Valley, in Brawley. It’s part of his congressional district against Bob Filner.

DH: That’s good. I’m glad that these long conversations are finally paying off for conservatives. (laughing)

AJM: (laughs) You twist my arm long enough! You keep going around the country, I’ve got like 10 of your guys I’m trying to support here! I’m going broke (laughs).

AJM: Yes. But hey, I tell you what, I sure appreciate the fact that you’re pushing these guys. Because frankly, every one that I’ve seen – that includes Kelly, Chris Reed, Vaughn up in Idaho – all these guys are mini Duncan Hunters. In other words they have the Reagan-Hunter conservative philosophy; and boy could we use that right now.

DH: Listen, that’s great of you to say that. I appreciate it. We’ll keep helping them.

I haven’t checked in on Jesse Kelly too much lately but I hope he goes over the top. It’s interesting, with Kelly and Vaughn Ward, you had these two Marines who are more motivated by patriotism and service to their country than anything else. That’s reflected in their military service. It’s often said that it is illogical to join the military and put yourself in harms way – the pay is low and you’re separated from your family and all those things. But those guys did that. They came back and they jumped into these primary races at a time when it did not look like Republicans would have a great year. Now that it looks like the Republicans will have a great year, late in the campaigns, State senators, who are much more calculating, have gotten into those races. So it’s kind of an interesting pattern. Don’t know if that’s occurred anywhere else. But up in Idaho, we’ve now got a state senator against Vaughn Ward, and in Arizona, where a state senator got in something like a year after Jesse Kelly got into the race. When the calculations started to look better, they got in.

AJM: Yeah, yeah. That’s another reason to thank you for pushing these conservatives. Some of these characters, including Fiorina who is up against DeVore – DeVore being a Vet too - are from the so called moderate wing of the party. They see their opportunity now so they are coming after it. Like you said, you can’t blame them, but it’s up to conservatives to get our guys through.

AJM: So I’ll support all the guys you are supporting because they are all very good.

AJM: The trick is to convince as many people on line – in the cyber world – to do the same. That’s what I’m after.

DH: While they are at it, if they want to support Duncan Hunter for his tough stand on the border, send him money.

DH: Oh I think he’s doing fine. I don’t think he has a tough primary. He’s got one opponent in the primary and I think he’ll be fine in the general. But Duncan’s REAL value is to go out and help other people. He’s been helping the entire team. He brought Vaughn Ward down for an event in San Diego here this last week. He wants to bring a lot of these young conservatives; he wants to bring across a team of winners here in November. So if you can help him that gives him a lot of leverage. He doesn’t raise much money for himself. I think he’s got like 130 or 140 thousand cash on hand, which is a lot. But he uses a lot of his resources to go out and help other conservatives. So it’s a great reason to campaign for Duncan or to help him. So if you like his positions, send him a check!

AJM: Well, you know what? This conversation will be posted all over the internet. Thousands of people will be reading it, and most of the people that will be reading it are conservatives. So there is some fruit being born from you having to put up with me. (laughs)

DH: Good. I’ll take credit for that when I talk to him. (laughs) I need a few points on the scoreboard.

AJM: (laughs) Listen, after your service to the country – which we hope is not ending any time soon – I don’t know how many points on the scoreboard you really need, frankly. But I guess more is always good.

AJM: OK. I just wanted a quick comment on the Tea Parties versus these latest May Day/immigration rallies that transpired over the last weekend. The Tea Parties, you know, they leave the grounds cleaner than when they arrived, they are polite to the police despite being fingered by the main stream media as being crazy right wing nuts. And then these May Day rallies, which were not even close to the size of the Tea Parties, breaking windows, fighting with the cops, getting violent and causing mayhem. So I’d like a comment on the contrast here.

DH: Well, as you know, there’s a double standard here that the liberals love. If they are having a radical, Marx-inspired protest, it’s an exercise in constitutional rights by liberals. And if you have a bunch of Republican octogenarians averaging 85 years of age, it’s a mob!

DH: I told you that I’ll never forget going down when they had the push for a recount, or the push for a countdown in Florida. And we had a lot of Republican activists going down to support our interpretation of the vote down there. I’ll never forget looking at that sea of older, senior citizen Republicans, and I looked at the press description of them and they spoke about them as a mob. Half of them had walkers!

DH: And the young ones were all lined up at the latte stand. They were going to go and incite violence just as soon as they got their double mocha Frappaccino!

DH: You see, my idea of a real mob is one photograph I saw of some of the people in Nancy Pelosi’s district who had the banner several years ago during an anti-war demonstration that said “we support our troops when they shoot their officers”.

DH: That kind of thing never draws a tough comment from the leftwing press. That’s an exercise in free speech. And as such, is sacrosanct.

AJM: Even to them, what I would call sedition, is sacrosanct to them. As long as its leftwing, right?

AJM: Now I want to talk briefly about Iran. Hillary Clinton came out a month ago talking to some Jewish group and said Iran’s not complying with the negotiations and it’s time for “crippling sanctions”. And Obama has used similar terminology, ‘crippling sanction’ type terminology, to kind of pump up his chest about this whole thing. But frankly, not a damn thing has been done. Nothing had changed with regards to Iran.

DH: I think the West is too porous and lacks the political will to present a solid seam of sanctions that can’t be flanked by Iran. And in the past, as you know, the communist Chinese and the Russians have worked to blunt any meaningful sanctions. And the facts are that once you enrich enough uranium to produce a couple of systems, at that point the situation changes fairly dramatically.

I think the Iranians are following what they perceive to be the Korean model; where you talk and build, talk and build. Then one day you test your nuclear system and say ‘we’re done – there’s no reason to discuss this anymore’. I think that is what they are doing. So the question to Mrs. Clinton is: What have you been doing for the past couple of years if you are just now talking about this time really getting serious?

AJM: It’s amazing. And not just amazing, but worrisome, because at some point soon – I think you’re right – the Iranians are going to pull that silver bullet out and say ‘hey guys, we have it’.

DH: On top of that, they really don’t have to achieve 90% enrichment to develop a nuclear device. You can develop a less effective, nonetheless very deadly system with a much lower rate of enrichment. Time is not on our side.

AJM: And in small country like Israel, that would cause quite a problem if one landed.

AJM: Yeah. Now I want to switch over once again to your favorite ‘conservative’ about whom you told Wolf Blitzer last time during the debates that “no, we don’t want to follow”, and that’s Mr. Schwarzenegger. We get an oil spill down in the gulf and all the sudden he’s coming out sounding like Nancy Pelosi saying ‘no more drilling anywhere on the coast’. I just want your take on the whole idea of the liberals and the tree-hugging republicans coming out and saying we need to ban offshore drilling.

DH: I think energy independence at this point is a security issue which is very, very serious. And certainly, we should be drilling.

The sad thing is that liberals, and people who are always testing the wind, like Schwarzenegger, they end up taking polls to decide what position they are going to have on offshore drilling at any given time in our history. Offshore drilling needs to be part of a long range, deliberate and systematic plan to achieve some level of energy independence.

That takes some discipline. It takes political discipline. That means you have to be for it even when you have an oil spill. If you change your position every time you have an oil spill, then you’ll never have it. And in the end, that means that petroleum lifeline between the United States and the Straights of Hormuz will remain a very crucial aspect of American survival. That means potentially we are going to have to project lots of military power in that region well into the future.

So energy independence is an important thing. And I think the fact that we change positions on that, or some people change positions on that as a function of the latest oil spill is a tragedy for our nation.

OK. A couple more quick ones. How’s Gunny Pop doing, since you’re going out to see him?

DH: Well, he’s been doing great. He’s moving around a lot, campaigning a lot. Every place he goes he’s well received. This guy Popaditch speaks like Ronald Reagan did. He’s very charismatic and he’s got a magnetic personality. He’s picking up lots of supporters. He’s truly achieving a grassroots organization. I think a testament to his ability is the fact that when he got in this race, the other republicans got out. I think that’s also a function of the respect that they have for him as a candidate and as a guy who truly is an American hero.

You know, he drove, he took his tank section, which is two tanks, the day before the main attack on Falluja on April 6, 2004, he took his tank section first into the city to save a Marine who had been wounded and was lying in the middle of the street about two blocks inside the city. The Gunny saved him. He moved in and pushed down an extra block to give him lots of room, to give the medics room to get him and retreat, which they did, and the Marine was saved. Then Gunny Pop said ‘I’m gonna keep on attacking, I don’t want to lose momentum’. And he took his tank and fought all night long against hordes of insurgents. He killed dozens of them with his main gun and his machine gun. All the while RPGs and bullets were bouncing off his tank. When he does that, he’s not buttoned up. He’s up in his turret where he can see and watch what’s happening. He drove that attack – himself and one other tank – almost all the way into the middle of Falluja. When he finally ran out of ammo at 4 o’clock in the morning, he cam back and the Marines resupplied him, Guadalcanal style. Hand over hand they resupplied his tank. He went back to the fight. Later that day he was hit with an RPG. That’s what took out one of his eyes.

But here’s a guy, with no sense of entitlement, no sense that he’s a victim. He got patched up. He’s out here campaigning. Great speaker. And I think he is going to win this congressional district in San Diego. So that’s what I’m doing today.

AJM: All I can say is thank God for Gunny Pop. I talked to him on the phone. We did that interview for Free Republic. I talked to his wife April. I know some of the patriots like you that support him. So yeah, if there is ever a ‘real deal’ in politics, or a real deal in just Americana, he’s it.

DH: Yeah. In fact I’ll tell you what Jim. For people that are watching this interview, reading this interview, if any of them were inclined to send money to my son after I urged them to do so, send that money to Nick Popaditch. Look him up on the internet and send that money to his website. The thing my son wants more than anything else is to get some of these great Marines and Soldiers who served with him in Iraq into the House of Representatives. He’d like that so if you got an extra $25 or $50 or $100 or several hundred bucks, send it to Nick Popaditch. You’d be helping an American hero and we’ve got a great chance of replacing a far left democrat with a good Republican conservative. And that’s much better, in my estimation, than spending money trying to decide which Republican is going to take a sure fire Republican district in a primary.

AJM: Yeah, there is something to be said for that, especially in Gunny Pop’s case. But like you said earlier, there’s also some value in trying to beat back the Schwarzenegger wing of the party in some of these open seats.

DH: That was a Border Patrol checkpoint. We’re driving along Highway 8, parallel to the border here in California.

AJM: This is kind of a pretty serious policy question. You know the car bomb in Times Square last week?

AJM: Well obviously we were lucky this guy wasn’t a very talented bomb maker. But beyond that, the question I have is when you catch these guys – I mean they caught this guy about as red handed as you can get – and that to me is what George Bush defined as an enemy combatant. I don’t care about his citizenship status at that point. When you join the other team and you purposely come after your fellow citizens for the enemy team, I think that you lose your citizenship. You lose some of the basic protections we have in the normal crime fighting arena and you are now in the realm of an enemy combatant. What do you think of that?

DH: Yeah. You obviously hit on what can best be described as a strange situation. That is: If you are a uniformed soldier and you fight honorably on the battlefield, and you are captured, you don’t have the right to ….

DH: Yeah, I apologize. We went through some pretty steep canyons. I was talking for about 10 minutes before I realized you were gone (laughs).

AJM: No, all I got was that you thought it odd that men in uniform who fight by the rules versus these Islamic terrorists….you were starting to go on about how we treated prisoners of war, I think.

DH: The point is if people fight in uniform in an honorable way, they don’t have a right to a lawyer and they do not have a right to habeas corpus. And they have very few of the rights we accord to common criminals. Yet, if they commit a heinous crime as a terrorist, Obama’s Justice Department gives them more, not fewer rights than soldiers do! It’s preposterous.

So, when I put together the terrorist tribunal legislation in 2006, we gave the terrorist who were at that point imprisoned in Guantanamo, we set in place a set of rules and rights for the terrorists that would approximate the same package of rights that the Nazi war criminals, who were tried at Nuremberg, received. But we did NOT give them all the rights of an American criminal defendant presently has.

I thought that was proper. And one of the challenges to civilized society in this age of Islamic terrorism is to ensure that we don’t jeopardize national security by affording a greater package of ‘rights’ to terrorists than they deserve!

So if you were looking for a discriminating factor that would result in this guy who was trying to set off a bomb in the United States, one factor would be if he had worked in another country with other terrorists. That then should cut him off from having the same body of rights as an American criminal defendant would have.

I think we have got to achieve a new standard. I like the standard that we have for the radicals that were captured in our global war on terrorists, who were ensconced in Guantanamo and other prisons. I think we did a good job. I think we afforded them enough rights where if we picked up people by accident or if there was extremely flimsy evidence against them, that they would be exonerated. But we didn’t render their prosecution impractical, like this administration seems to be attempting.

You have to realize that when you are on a battlefield, you can’t bring in a bunch of policemen to replicate the crime scene and draw chalk lines and do all the things that you do, like lift fingerprints. You have to move very quickly. And often the Americans who witnessed the fighting, who captured the terrorists, may be incapacitated or maybe even killed themselves in battle before they can come back and serve as witnesses.

So you have to have a practical system enables you to try terrorists in such a way that we are going to be able to keep a large percentage of them off the streets and off the battlefields.

AJM: I agree. But this rush to read them their Miranda rights – and Obama reads them their Miranda rights whether they are US citizens or not – this last character was a US citizen. But by not at least delaying his Miranda rights they could have had time to do a little more research. Because they since found out that he was over in Pakistan for five months training with the terrorists how to make bombs. SO that to me is a void that I think Lieberman and Lindsey Graham are introducing legislation to address this.

DH: Yeah. Well those are my general thought on this. And that is you can’t give to terrorists the same large groups of rights that we give to criminals in the United States. It would be much more difficult to keep them, to incarcerate them, and maintain them in a security institution where they can’t get out and continue to wage war and damage American interests.

AJM: I certainly will. I’ve been trying to keep up with him. They email me stuff occasionally and I post it. But its getting to be crunch time now, so I think I’d like to volunteer a little more of my time on their behalf, as well as for a few of the other guys. But he’s a good one.

AJM: Well, we’ll catch you next week and their will be a new batch of things to address. One of these sessions, when its maybe a little quieter on the political scence, I’d like to go back and get some of your philosophical takes on the United States, the guys in US history that you admire and things of that nature that aren’t necessarily current events. More like a philosophical evaluation of the United States and conservatism.

DH: Hey listen, that’d be great. I’ll see you here a little later. Thanks a lot for calling.

AJM: OK, and when you do that DeVore thing let me know. If you just want to announce it to me, I’ll spread the word. I don’t know if you are going to do an ‘event’ for him, but when you endorse him, I’ll want to get that up as fast as possible, because the primary is coming up.

DH: Yeah, I got that. I’ll take a look at that and see if there is something I can do to be of assistance to him.