Since I wrote about Mitch McConnell in the last entry, I'm going to stay on the subject. I just have to comment about the TV campaign ad he is running ad naseum on WPSD, the NBC affiliate out of Paducah, and a part of Paxton Media Group.

McConnell begins the ad by using the image of the late Alben Barkley, (the Veep) former DEMOCRATIC U.S. Senator and Vice-President under Truman. McConnell says that he and Barkley are the only two Senators from Kentucky to rise to leadership. I'm sure he would say if asked that he only is stating a fact about he and Barkley, and not to take anything more from the ad. But that is a bunch of BS. He is trying to piggyback on the reputation of Barkley, a staunch Democrat who is held in high esteem in the state.

It's clear from watching the ad a number of times, too many times, actually, that McConnell is trying to gain credibility by using Barkley's name and picture in the ad. The idea that the Veep would have supported McConnell's failed right wing republican policies is beyond the pale. I'm sure that the late "Veep" rolls over in his grave everytime that ad is played.

So if that isn't bad enough, McConnell then brags about the billion (yes, with a "b", but it's actually more like a billion and a half or more at this point) dollars he has brought to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant for cleanup. What a joke that is! Truth is that McConnell was so caught with his pants down in August of 1998 when Joby Warrick of the Washington Post broke a series of stories which went national immediately, about how workers and the public had been lied to repeatedly about the extent of contamination by Plutonium at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant, something always denied by plant officials. Of course, it wasn't just McConnell caught with his pants down. But he for sure was. He was oblivious to how bad the situation was out there. So any kind of notion that he was right on top of the situation out at the plant is beyond absurd - an out and out lie. I know, because I was chair of the Citizen's Advisory Board at the plant at the time.

But even worse yet is that the money that McConnell has purportedly gotten, the billion dollars that he brags about on the ad, has been squandered and very little cleanup has occured. For a billion and a half dollars, the public has gotten a pile of crushed barrels and some radioactive scrap metal loaded on to train cars and taken out to Utah and dumped in the desert, some barrels of radioactive PCB sludge put on trucks and hauled to Oak Ridge to be burned in their incinerator, a bunch of uncontaminated soil dug up and put into a sanitary landfill on site, and a bunch of "pilot" projects, most of which haven't worked. Almost all of the major problems at the site remain with no easy answers, and little money to deal with them. Mitch won't tell you that in his ad, that's for sure. There are a number of old landfills, old dumps, old spill sites, and old buildings that are all highly contaminated for which real cleanup hasn't even begun. The cleanup of the groundwater plume, one if not the worst in the country, has been abandoned. Radioactive, chemically, and heavy metal contaminated groundwater seeps 24 hours a day into the Ohio River.

But Bechtel Jacobs, the main clean up contractor for many years, made a lot of money. Yes, a lot of corporations have made lots of money. But have they gotten a lot of the site cleaned up? Uh, plain and simple, the answer is NO. But McConnell won't tell you that. The rest of the ad is about as accurate.

It's time for a Democrat to get the hounds out and track down McConnell's record. Fans of Kentucky politics know exactly what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the Dems have any good dog handlers. We'll see. But I'm not sure that political newcomers, even well financed, can mount a successful challenge to the well entrenched McConnell. So far, the Democratic candidates who are in the race don't seem to have the statewide name recognition or money necessary to take on McConnell. But, if the economy continues to tank, the situation in Iraq doesn't improve substantially, prices continue to rise, and unemployment continues to rise, there could be a Democratic sweep across the country that could take McConnell out of office, but it's unlikely - unfortunately.