Valerie Plame is running for Congress. Under normal circumstances, a video being used to launch a campaign showing the candidate as an attractive blonde woman racing at high-speed on a deserted desert road would be badass, right? What if the video ad is chock-full of outright lies? Are we to be so taken with the visuals of the ad that we ignore the script?

That was probably the plan but the campaign video that began making its way around the Internet Monday is not garnering the response hoped for, at least among Republicans. Plame is driving the car in reverse, though, for effect, but it doesn’t come off with quite the result she was going for. If you know her story, the lies leap off your computer screen. Check it out.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane. If Plame’s name sounds familiar, it is because she was exposed as a CIA operative by the George W. Bush administration and her career came to a screeching halt. Normally that would bring about some sympathy over a career cut short due to the politics of the day but in her case, the whole story was one of a web of deception at the highest levels. It took years for the truth to come out.

Valerie Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, was a diplomat and ambassador during the days of the George H.W. Bush administration. During the lead-up to the Iraq war, George W.’s administration asked Wilson to go to Niger and check out the story of that country’s link to Iraq’s weapons program. He was investigating the truth in reports that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium. Upon his return, he told the Bush administration that the story was false. He even wrote an op-ed published by the New York Times about it. The Bushies, eager to launch the war to take out Saddam, were not pleased. Plame’s identity was leaked and her spy days were over. Plame and Wilson moved to New Mexico and raised their family. They divorced in 2017.

The wrong guy was made the villain in her story, though. Plame uses the old narrative that Scooter Libby – former Vice-President Cheney’s chief of staff – outed her. Libby served jail time over that lie. The true leaker was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department. Armitage admitted he leaked Plame’s identity to journalist Robert Novak for the 2003 story… in 2006. G.W. Bush commuted Libby’s sentence. President Trump pardoned Libby.

Now Valerie Plame is running for Congress. Not only does she continue the now-discredited lie about Scooter Libby, but she also wants revenge. She also says she is coming after President Trump to settle scores. What exactly does a wannabe freshman congresswoman think she will do to settle the score with President Trump? It’s egotistical bravado. Some journalists and conservatives on Twitter immediately called-out Plame for the untruthfulness of her video. Members of the CIA aren’t happy, either.

2. Valerie Plame's former colleagues at CIA have been pretty vocal on Twitter today that her launch spot trivializes the work they do and turns it into a James Bond ad rather than conducting serious/important clandestine operations and offering critical analysis to policymakers.

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) September 9, 2019

The implication that she lived in North Korea and Iran is nonsensical. Using the CIA seal is illegal. And that reference to her Ukranian Jewish heritage? That’s to get out in front of the history she has on social media of re-tweeting anti-Semitic tweets.

She is also no stranger to controversy, and in 2017, faced a torrent of criticism for retweeting and praising an anti-Semitic article in the Unz Review authored by Phillip Giraldi titled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” Plame called it “very, very provocative, but thoughtful.”
The Unz Review website was founded by former California GOP gubernatorial candidate Ron Unz, who has said that the “standard Holocaust narrative is at least substantially false, and quite possibly, almost entirely so.”

“The retweeted article by Phillip Giraldi itself contains the usual anti-Semitic tropes: Jews are guilty of dual loyalty; they control politicians, the media and entertainment; they want the U.S. to fight wars for the country to which they have real allegiance – Israel; they are dangerous to America. Giraldi has been pushing this garbage for years and Plame is one of his fans,” Alan Dershowitz wrote for FoxNews.com at the time.

Dershowitz added: “For Plame to claim that she was unaware of the anti-Semitic content of Giraldi’s article is to ignore reality. Plame had to be aware, since she was aware of Giraldi’s bigotry. Her apologies ring hollow.”

And one more tidbit in her past – she was actively trying to buy a stake in Twitter in order to keep President Trump off of it.

Plame is no stranger to well-orchestrated stunts — at one point raising nearly $90,000 on a crowdsourcing site to buy a stake in Twitter in hopes of banning the president from the social media platform.

She’s running as a Democrat in a contested open House seat in northern New Mexico. The seat is currently held by Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Lujan. He isn’t running for re-election. We will see how well her James Bond parody plays there.