Laura Armstrong: Gonzalez shows true colors with smears against anti-illegal immigration activist

The Marietta Daily Journal

July 09, 2011

The executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials is a guy named Jerry Gonzalez. Gonzalez was quoted in a recent AP news article characterizing a thorn in his side, illegal immigration activist D.A. King, in a way that’s to be expected from a far left, anti-enforcement perspective.

“I think (King) works to push his agenda in a very divisive way,” Gonzalez asserted in the article (“King key to immigration bill crafting” page 1B of the Tuesday MDJ).

“One has to look at who this man is,” he practically hisses, “He is a convicted felon who is advising our legislators and our governor on very important policy matters.”

Gonzalez, in his egregious and very personal condemnation of “who this man is” attempted for the umpteenth time to impugn King’s character, demonizing him for a 34-year old gambling charge King readily acknowledges, pled guilty to, paid a fine and dutifully did two years of probation for as the law required.

Gonzalez, ever the hypocrite, never tires of trying to shift attention away from the millions of lawbreakers he supports onto private-citizen King, but his tactic is getting old, really old.

For the record, Cobb countians know King as an honorable man and writer of more than 70 columns on illegal immigration for this paper. Grandson of a Detroit police officer, he’s a former Marine who voluntarily enlisted as a young man at the height of the Vietnam war in 1969, which says a lot about his dedication to this country.

Later, he went into the insurance business. I first saw him at a very small town hall meeting with my then-congressman, Tom Price. Only about a dozen citizens were in attendance, and I admired King’s polite demeanor and his articulate and lively exchange with Price. Since then, I’ve come to know him as a true gentleman – tenacious, intelligent and thorough. He values truth and has a great sense of humor, except when it comes to serious matters of our broken immigration policy and the jobs and lives lost because of it. His courage to do what he feels is the right thing has not been dampened, despite vicious attacks on his character, blacklisting by certain national and local media (he just knows too much and debates too well) and petty treatment by some legislative lackeys and political spokesmen (see my May 14 column).

King is a citizen who works for nothing to change our broken system and the stakes have been high for him, with more than a little personal and financial sacrifice over the last decade.

But back to Gonzalez’s overstated and fallacious concern about a “convicted felon who is advising our legislators ….”

I wrote a column last week highlighting a news release from ICE union President Chris Crane. In it, he said this about the latest federal directives on illegal immigration:

“ICE and the Administration have excluded our union and our agents from the entire process … it was all kept secret from us, we found out from the newspapers. ICE (Director and Obama appointee John Morton) worked hand-in-hand with immigrants rights groups, but excluded its own officers.

Agents say the policy is a law enforcement nightmare developed by the Administration to win votes at the expense of sound and responsible law enforcement policy.

“The desires of foreign nationals illegally in the United States were the framework from which these policies were developed,” Crane said, “the result is a means for every person here illegally to avoid arrest or detention, as officers we will never know who we can or cannot arrest.”

But have we heard anything from Jerry Gonzalez on the devastating ICE memo? Is he concerned that HIS side is “advising our legislators” at the very top levels of government? Of course not.

Jerry Gonzalez and his anti-enforcement crowd are political opportunists and hypocrites. Some would say they’re unindicted co-conspirators under federal law for transporting, sheltering and encouraging illegal immigrants to remain illegally in the U.S.

And he has a colorful history too, though we never seem to read about it. A militant gay activist who got a job with well-funded, litigation-crazed MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense yada yada (see www.discoverthenetworks.org), he went to work for State Sen. Sam Zamarippa as a fundraiser. He was then installed by Zamarippa, a democrat, as titular head of GALEO and is paid (unlike citizen-activist D.A. King) to march through the streets of Atlanta, lobbying legislators and working his way onto Georgia Trend’s list of influential Georgians. Big money – GALEO claims Jane Fonda as an initial friend – makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

But Gonzalez is a typical leftist, all over the map, demanding an end to enforcement of immigration laws on the federal level, but then turning around and demanding an end on the state level because it is the fed’s responsibility.

In testimony before the Georgia state legislature last session, eye witnesses tell me Gonzalez announced we can’t afford to enforce the rule of law because of budget shortages. Never let a crisis go to waste, eh Jerry? But soon he was contradicting that stand on Fox news Atlanta TV, saying we must obey the rule of law in awarding citizenship to children of illegals.

Their arguments are practically indefensible, which is why D.A. King routs them every time in debates and therefore must be trashed, repeatedly.

Gonzalez’s tribalist, anti-assimilation leanings are also evident when it comes to his quotes on English as our official language, saying it should not stand.

“What we will see in the 2010 Census results once they are all finally released is that the Latino community is a growing and vibrant part of this nation’s future that must be respected. These types of “English-only” provisions are an insult to our culture.”

Until someone starts taking a long, hard look at paid activists such as Gonzalez, the titular leader and spokesman of a quasi-credible organization that pays him to represent less than a couple dozen real hispanic elected officials, we’ll all just keep pretending this is about human rights.

What not enough people understand is that the “movement” Gonzalez represents is really an attempt to undermine America and take over a political party, funded by radical, racist groups like LaRaza, corrupt, anti-American unions like the SEIU, communist groups such as International A.N.S.W.E.R. and corporate and industry bigwigs who stand to benefit from open borders. Coca-Cola (I’m sorry to say), Hewlett-Packard, Georgia-Power, Glaxo-Smith-Kline and the Wine and Spirit Wholesalers of Georgia are among those who fund Gonzalez to strut around and say bad things about good citizens like D.A. King.

Well, I’ll stand up for D.A. any time against those kinds of smears.

In the meantime, keep ’em coming Mr. Gonzalez. The more you say, the more we understand just what you are about.

Lbarmstrong3378@comcast. net

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