With less than a week to go before West Virginia’s U.S. Senate Republican primary, a former mining CEO turned recently released convict has a new, catchy insult for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.“One of my goals as U.S. senator will be to ditch Cocaine Mitch,” former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship declared at the end of his new campaign ad, released not long after a new set of polls showed him trailing in third place, well behind Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. But Blankenship’s ire isn’t just directed at McConnell; he also jabs at McConnell's wife, and blames politicians and regulators for blowing up his mine.“Politicians are running a lot of crazy ads. They blew up the coal mine, and then put me in prison,” Blankenship says in the ad.Before he turned to politics, Blankenship, 68, ran Massey Energy until a mine the company operated collapsed, killing 29 men. Several independent reviews found that the company had hidden safety lapses from regulators, and Blankenship was sentenced to a year in prison for the misdemeanor crime of conspiring to violate mine safety and health standards. Massey was also found liable in several investigations, and the company was sold off to a competitor after Blankenship’s conviction.Blankenship was released from prison in May of 2017 and announced his candidacy six months later. His campaign website features a post fingering none other than the federal mine safety administration as responsible for the mine explosion. He also blames Joe Manchin, the current Democratic senator from West Virginia, who was governor of the state at the time of mine explosion, for putting together the independent panel that found Blankenship’s company at fault in the blast.If Blankenship wins the Republican primary, he’ll face off against Manchin in the general Senate election in November.But he’ll have to overcome his sagging polls to get there. The new McConnell-focused ads, released Monday, reference a 2014 story in The Nation, which reported that 90 pounds of cocaine had been seized aboard a shipping vessel owned by the father of his wife, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao.Blankenship has also accused McConnell of having “extensive ties” to China, citing his wife’s heritage.“Mitch McConnell and his family have extensive ties to China,” the Blankenship campaign said in a statement explaining the ad. “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 and that is why we’ve deemed him ‘Cocaine Mitch.’”And Blankenship called Chao’s dad a “wealthy Chinaperson” on a West Virginia radio show last week.McConnell dismissed that barb at the time on Fox News, saying, “My father-in-law is an American who lives in New York. Works in New York. And I don't have any comment about ridiculous observations like that.”You can watch Blankenship robotically drawl his way through insults in the full ad below:
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