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Members of Congress are continually beset by powerful media forces. Valerie Plame of Santa Fe has been through the worst of such trials by fire, after her husband’s 2003 New York Times editorial debunking Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s fabricated mythologies of Saddam Hussein buying Uranium from Niger to make those “weapons of mass destruction.” Valerie’s husband then was Joe Wilson, ambassador to Niger, and he made it clear that such purchases never happened.

Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address included these 16 words: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” In response, in his Times opinion piece, Wilson published “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Wilson, who died last year, described the basis for his Niger mission: “The vice president’s office asked a serious question (about the truth of allegations that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger).

“I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him,” Wilson wrote. “Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program – all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was aware of the dangers he posed. But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America’s foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor ‘revisionist history,’ as Bush suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security.”

To retaliate for Wilson’s op-ed, Cheney’s office outed Plame as a CIA agent, endangering her by exposing them as CIA agents. Further, a bit later, Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby lied to Congress about all of that, saying it hadn’t happened, for which he went to prison for two years for lying to Congress, until Donald Trump pardoned him. But Plame’s CIA career was over, ruined.

This background would make her a superb member of Congress for northern New Mexico, someone who can instantly see through the machinations and perfidy of the mega kleptocracies, so full of corporate manipulations and distortions of the truth.

The shallowest, most skeptical and least informed of New Mexicans mistakenly choose to assail Plame as a “carpetbagger,” yet her response rings true, that she got to New Mexico as soon as she could.

Anyone who knows anything about government knows that, in today’s political world, there are intelligent and valuable Americans who work internationally; the fact that they at one time recently lived in Georgetown or Alexandria, Virginia, doesn’t make them any less effective on regional levels, whether it be discussing acequias in Taos or the “defense” expenditures of Los Alamos, the housing crisis in Santa Fe, or the largest questions of how New Mexico can diversify its economies over the next decade so as not to be so dependent on only oil, tourism, ranching and military weapons production.

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In 2020, if you want a hometown boy or girl to be your congress member, you have many to choose from. They just are not on the level with, or caliber of, Valerie Plame. Issues and specifics come and go, but what builds the strongest possible character to make a valuable member of Congress?

Valerie’s story is a powerful and convincing one, which points to unparalleled and unprecedented service in our nation’s Congress.

Shania Wheeler lives in Santa Fe.