For ex-CIA officer and anti-Semitic conspiracy monger Valerie Plame, who now is running for Congress in New Mexico, lies and smears apparently are fair game.
Plame this week released a spectacularly meretricious video advertisement that repeats the thoroughly debunked falsehood that former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby “leaked [her] identity.” It’s not true. But it’s all part of a high-gloss effort to further the image Hollywood created for her in 2010.
Years after Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — not Libby — inadvertently revealed Plame’s allegedly covert status to columnist Robert Novak in 2003, Hollywood turned Plame into a heroine in its movie Fair Game. This film, a very entertaining but even more misleading piece of agitprop, portrayed Plame and her flagrantly dishonest then-husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, as victims of a vast right-wing conspiracy.
The out-of-control prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wrongly convinced a jury to convict Libby of lying about the Plame affair, even though Libby definitively was neither Novak’s primary nor secondary source. But Libby’s closeness to Vice President Dick Cheney added heft to the crazed idea of a sinister, anti-Plame-and-Wilson conspiracy. As a result, both the movie and Plame’s new ad portray Libby as the heavy.
It’s sickening. Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler gave Plame’s ad a “three Pinocchio” score (with four being the worst) for its degree of falsehood.
Still, because President Trump finally pardoned Libby when the exonerating evidence became overwhelming (a pardon that President George W. Bush should have signed back in 2009), Plame presents herself now as a victim of Trump as well. The ad ends with Plame looking into the camera while saying, “Mr. President, I’ve got a few scores to settle.”
Plame should spare us the deceit and the drama-queen persona. With her book and movie deals, she surely has made a pretty penny from her fame. And to somehow present herself as an avenging angel against Trump (apparently a convenient political target in Plame’s New Mexico district) is ludicrous. Trump’s pardon of the innocent Libby did absolutely nothing to inconvenience Plame.
Libby, however, lost his voting privileges for several years, lost his law license for nearly a decade, paid huge legal fees, and was fined another $250,000, all for lies he never told about a leak he didn’t commit. It is beyond disgusting for Plame again to demonize Libby by portraying him as a malevolent mastermind of “revenge” against her husband.
Plame should get nowhere near a seat in Congress. Even by Congress’ sometimes questionable standards, her level of integrity is woefully lacking.
