How awkward. A senior White House aide has been indicted, and suddenly, in Republican circles, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not the big deal that it used to be.

The indictment of Vice President Richard Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and the continuing investigation of President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, make it increasingly difficult for the Bush administration to point fingers only at Democrats for devaluing the rule of law.

Days before Mr. Libby's indictment, for example, the conservative spin machine shifted into overdrive with a pre-emptive public relations strike that was astonishing in its bold audacity.

Mr. Libby was indicted Friday by a grand jury on five counts - one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements in Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name.

Defenders of Team Bush seized on the fact that the indictment does not accuse Mr. Libby of violating national security laws, such as leaking the identity of Ms. Plame, but of lying about how and when he learned her identity in 2003 and told reporters about it.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison anticipated such a development when she expressed the hope on NBC's Meet the Press on Oct. 23 that "if there is going to be an indictment ... that it is an indictment on a crime, and not some perjury technicality."

Funny how Ms. Hutchinson and her fellow Republican senators took "some perjury technicality" a lot more seriously when they tried President Bill Clinton for it - a charge of which he was acquitted with the help of some Republicans.

Since even fellow partisans were offended by Ms. Hutchison's perjury-is-no-big-deal spin, it soon was displaced in the conservative chorus by variations on the notion that Mr. Bush's critics are trying to turn an ordinary political and policy dispute into a crime.

A day after Ms. Hutchinson's statements, The New York Times reported that "allies of the White House suggested ... that they intended to pursue a strategy of attacking any criminal charges as a disagreement over legal technicalities or the product of an overzealous prosecutor."

Indeed, going after the prosecutor is a tactic that former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, indicted under Texas state law in connection with an alleged campaign-finance money-laundering scheme, and friends are using in hopes of winning a favorable jury pool.

But Mr. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney based in Chicago, has a hard-to-shake reputation as a no-nonsense equal-opportunity indicter of members of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration, Illinois' former Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, and various members of the Gambino crime family, among other targets.

Yet, the no-big-deal spin persists. It's embodied in the phrase "criminalization of politics," repeated so many times during the past month by Fox-TV anchors and commentators. The liberal ThinkProgress.org Web site posted a hilarious online video montage of some of the sound bites.

Whose politics are being criminalized? Team Bush disagreed with much of the intelligence community in the debate over Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Reality check: The White House had a right to go after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Ms. Plame's husband, who criticized in a New York Times op-ed essay Mr. Bush's claim that Saddam was seeking nuclear materials in Africa. But, in going after Mr. Wilson, the administration did not have a right to break the law.

And the rest of us have the right, no matter how vigorously Team Bush tries to change the subject, to ask questions of our own. For example, why did the administration seem to be far more concerned with silencing Mr. Wilson than with responding to his legitimate concerns?

This is cache, read story here