If indeed the administration of President George W. Bush was trying to change the subject from the indictment of vice-presidential aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, it looks like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has managed to change it back. Reid’s invoking a rare closed session on Wednesday drew attention away from the announcement of federal Judge Samuel Alito’s U.S. Supreme Court nomination and Bush’s bird flu news conference back to the core issue: Libby.

But, as Reid said, Libby is but the tip of the iceberg, a doorway through which to enter the true story: Were Americans deliberately lied to during the run-up to war? Libby acted, after all, to silence administration critic and former ambassador Joe Wilson, who was hammering away at the infamous lie about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger to re-start a nuclear weapons program that simply did not exist.

“The Libby indictment provides a window into what this is really all about, how this administration manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq and attempted to destroy those who dared challenge its actions,” Reid said before making the closed-door motion.

And, let us not forget, Libby was one of the key backers for war, part of the White House cabal intent on selling and defending the conflict. He was also part of neoconservative circles that had long wanted to use Iraq to change the Middle East’s political landscape.

Yes, Reid’s action definitely opened some eyes, even if it did irritate Republicans who apparently have been sitting on the second part of an investigation that may prove harmful to the Bush administration. Although they claim they were about to finish their inquiry, it took Reid shutting down the Senate to get a firm, on-the-record commitment.

When is the last time the Senate went into a rare, closed-door, secret session? Not since the heady days of the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton, who had lied during an inquiry into whether he got a blow job at the White House.

You know, we at Various Things & Stuff can’t help but marvel at the problems faced by the two presidents, Clinton and Bush. Republicans hated Clinton and dogged him during his eight years in office (which he won, by the way, in elections free of allegations of fraud). They impeached him because he’d lied during an investigation of his sex life.

Meanwhile, Bush sent the nation to war on the basis of intelligence that we now know was false. What we don’t know, and what Reid was trying to learn on Wednesday, was whether that intelligence was cooked, whether the administration chose to believe what it wanted to believe, rather than the facts, and whether the war was, in fact, a preordained priority of the administration. And more than 2,000 American service members have died in that war, let us not forget.

In retrospect, Clinton’s crime seems small, petty and almost irrelevant in comparison.

We wonder why, aside from simple partisan loyalty, Republicans are not more upset at Bush. They are supposed to be the party that’s strong on defense, pro-military and better at keeping the nation’s secrets. Yet there is no outcry, no talk of impeachment, and seemingly no anger.

Where, we wonder, is our own U.S. Sen. John Ensign? Back in Sept. 1998, Ensign called on Clinton to resign from office rather than face impeachment because of the way he’d misled people about the most infamous blow job ever.

“Think about it. He [Clinton] sent taxpayer-paid staff out to lie for him, and that is a misuse of office,” Ensign told the Review-Journal at the time.

Well, senator, it looks like another president has sent taxpayer-paid staff out to lie for him (they claimed or implied that Iraq was connected to al Qaida and Sept. 11; they claimed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and a nuclear program; former Secretary of State Colin Powell, though he had doubts, told the United Nations Security Council about a long list of fake WMDs; and Bush himself claimed we’d found the weapons of mass destruction).

To quote one of your own, “where’s the outrage?” And if it is a misuse of office worthy of resignation or impeachment to lie about a blow job, how in the hell is it not a misuse of office to take the country to war under false pretenses?

Senator?