Nelson Mandela. Martin Luther King Jr. Aung San Suu Kyi. Mohandas Gandhi. Vaclav Havel.
And now, Don Blankenship.
Go ahead, laugh. You’re part of that politically correct crowd that’s taken over America and is about to put the corrupt shrew in the White House. But real Americans know. Don Blankenship is a political prisoner, no less than Mandela and all the above-named. Just ask him, in his missive written from the (privately operated, which he surely appreciates) place he now so unfairly calls home, namely his Letter from Taft Correctional Institution—a modern-day Letter From Birmingham City Jail.
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I know. You think Blankenship was fairly convicted by a jury of his peers. You believe all that big-government propaganda about the 5,000 safety violations filed against the company that owned the Upper Big Branch (UBB) Mine, where 29 miners died in a 2010 explosion. You fall for it hook, line, and sinker when the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA, aka the Appalachian Gestapo) lies that many of those were “significant and substantial.” You probably bought it when that pinko Davitt McAteer, who’s been killing jobs in West Virginia for decades, said Upper Big Branch was “an accident waiting to happen.”
You buy all the lamestream media lies about the ventilation problems, the direction of the air flow, the complaints miners made that supervisors shrugged off. You’re so brainwashed you don’t even know you’re brainwashed. Methane is just one of those things that happen. Natural gas is called “natural” for a reason, people. Real Americans, and real West Virginians, understand this.
That’s the truth about what happened. But in Barack Obama’s America... well, enough said on that point. And that trial! What a sham. And that judge! A woman. Women don’t understand these things. And an Obama appointee. And on top of that an African American. Which is fine. Many blacks are good people—of course. But her, admitting the safety record into evidence. What kind of justice is that?
And those prosecutors, that Booth Goodwin crowd. Envious, really. They envy success. Can’t stand successful people. They and the judge, they were all in on it. Blankenship’s defense lawyers were squeezed from both sides, constantly. Like when the defense attorney asked an expert witness, “Do you know who Barack Obama is?” and the prosecutors shot out of their seats and objected and the judge stopped everything and went into private conference. How could that question not be germane? It all went back to Obama. Everybody knows that.
A great man has been smeared here. Yeah, he’s only serving one year over those 29 deaths (Good Lord willing, less—there’s a hearing on that this month). And yeah, he’s in a minimum-security facility that, according to one ex-inmate, has a vast sports complex and six pool tables and six foosball tables. But it’s the principle of the thing, dammit. Just look at everything Blankenship has done for West Virginia. He got rid of that pervert on the state supreme court. OK, not pervert. But he freed a child molester who then got a job in a school. Well, he didn’t do it alone, true. And OK, he didn’t actually write the opinion, even. But still. Don was thinking only of the children.
The fact that Don’s preferred candidate, the man who beat the pervert-enabler, failed to recuse himself in a case three years later that involved Blankenship, and then he ruled for Blankenship, reversing a $50 million damage award against Blankenship that a jury had decreed? The law is the law. He was just calling balls and strikes, my friend. And the fact that a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court later reversed that court’s ruling, and Anthony Kennedy calling the conflict of interest of Don’s judge “extreme”? Well, that Kennedy’s been a squish for a long time. Angling for a seat on Killary’s World Supreme Court.
Put it together, folks. It spells A-M-E-R-I-C-A-N P-O-L-I-T-I-C-A-L P-R-I-S-O-N-E-R. Now Don writes this 67-page booklet explaining everything, laying it all out, and the liberal media kicks him around more. Fine. Let ’em. The truth will out. After all, he’s going to mail 250,000 copies of his manifesto around, not just put it on the internet. It was all MSHA’s fault. MSHA did it, and MSHA covered it up.
“You can be sure I am fully innocent,” the freedom fighter writes. “In fact, more than 100 percent innocent. I spent my life improving coal miner safety and exercising my right to free speech… The real conspiracies were the government’s cover-up of the UBB truth and my prosecution.”
Someday people will know. Maybe soon. President Trump will tell the truth. And he’ll pardon Don. Great men understand each other.
Note: Obviously, the above is satire. Former West Virginia State Supreme Court Justice Warren McGraw spent decades upholding the rights of working people, and that, not any child molester, is the reason Blankenship spent $3 million to defeat him in 2004. Booth Goodwin served as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia for six years with distinction. Davitt McAteer, the nation’s leading mine-safety expert (and, full disclosure, a friend of my late father), has done work since the early 1970s that has saved who knows how many lives. He is a great man. Don Blankenship is... not a great man.
