On Sunday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox’s Chris Wallace that U.S. asylum for former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was “not on the table.” However, she refused to explicitly rule the option out, insisting that he had been a “good ally.” Watch it:

But now that Musharraf has officially stepped down, the Bush administration appears to be increasingly receptive to opening America’s doors to the former military leader. State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters that Musharraf “has a right to live wherever he wants.” AFP reports:

“We haven’t been asked to provide him with any asylum or place of residence,” State Department spokesman Robert Wood said amid speculations that the former staunch US “war on terror” ally who quit Monday might stay abroad, including in the United States.

“If he chooses to take up residence somewhere, I mean if he were to request that, we would obviously look at it, but it’s not an issue that we’ve been approached with,” Wood explained.

This willingness to grant Musharraf asylum may be coming from the top ranks of the White House. Nearly nearly three weeks after Musharraf declared emergency rule last November, President Bush continued to insist that the Pakistani president had “advanced democracy in Pakistan.” According to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, Bush was the “last holdout” of support for Musharraf in the Bush administration, outlasting both Rice and Vice President Cheney.

Shuja Nawaz, a former Pakistani journalist and International Development Agency official, told PBS on Monday that “a possible immediate destination [for Musharraf] may be Dubai, and then eventually may be New Mexico in the United States.”

Our guest blogger is Henry Fernandez, a Senior Fellow at the Center For American Progress Action Fund working on state and municipal issues.

Henry Cejudo’s uniquely American story started with a single mother who taught him what it meant to truly fight. His mother Nelly – an undocumented immigrant — moved him and his siblings several times chasing work and opportunity, scraping by, ensuring her kids got an education. And along the way, the family found a channel for both the tough resilience she modeled and the country they loved through the sport of freestyle wrestling.

With the brothers he shared a bed with growing up cheering from the stands (as well as his sister), Cejudo repeatedly got off the mat to come back and win in a tough match against Tomohiro Matsunaga of Japan. And now America has both an unexpected gold medal and a new hero.

Today in Beijing, our nation proudly called Cejudo one of our own:

“What Henry has accomplished is an American success story,” USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said. “This is a story of perseverance and determination. We couldn’t be more proud of Henry, not only for what he has accomplished on the mat, but for how he has represented our country.”

It has become commonplace on the right to talk about how recent immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants and their children, do not want to assimilate, learn English or identify themselves as truly American.

Yet this family – all of them proud to be the cheering voice of the United States in a city on the other side of the planet – did our country proud:

They all wore or waved American flags, an entire family decked in the stars and stripes. A family that started with illegal immigrants and advanced to right here, this moment, their very own gold medalist resting in their lap.

“Only in America,” Cejudo said.