With one week to go in the West Virginia Senate GOP primary race, ex-convict and former coal baron Don Blankenship has stepped up his attack on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
At the end of a bizarre campaign ad on his Facebook page Monday, Blankenship says, “One of my goals as U.S. senator will be to ditch Cocaine Mitch.”
But the ad never explains where the name “cocaine Mitch” comes from, which is probably why the original ad that Politico and others linked to yesterday evening was taken down (you can see the dead link here).
On Tuesday morning, the campaign re-posted the ad with a long explanation. The campaign asserts McConnell’s father-in-law “owns a large Chinese shipping company [that] has given Mitch and his wife millions of dollars over the years.”
Blankenship’s campaign claims that “The company was implicated recently in smuggling cocaine from Colombia to Europe, hidden aboard a company ship carrying foreign coal was $7 million dollars of cocaine.”
So that’s why Blankenship calls him “cocaine Mitch.” For the record, “recently” means 2014, since that’s when the cocaine story was first reported.
The reason the campaign is going after McConnell, who is from Kentucky, so hard in the final days is that the Senate majority leader has backed an ad campaign attacking the former coal baron.
While earlier polls had suggested the primary was in a dead heat, recent polls suggest that the attacks worked, and that Blankenship is fading down the stretch.
Blankenship has long been a controversial figure in the state. He recently finished a one-year sentence in federal prison for ignoring federal mine safety regulations in the lead up to the 2010 tragedy in Massey’s Upper Big Branch, which killed 29 miners, making it the worst coal mining disaster in decades.
The new ad offers a strange non-defense of Blankenship:
The politicians are running a lot of crazy ads. They blew up the coal mine. And then put me in prison. Now they’re running ads saying the coal mine blew up, and I went to prison. There’s no surprise there.
That’s the campaign’s entire defense. It wasn’t Blankenship who was responsible — an unnamed “they” were. A federal court disagreed when it sentenced Blankenship. And the voters of West Virginia will decide in a week whose ads were truly “crazy.”