Jon Chait is saying what needs to be said about conservative outrage over the sexism/elitism charges the White House is directing at critics of Harriet Miers:

Conservatives certainly have a right to be outraged. After all, they oppose Miers on the basis of her lack of qualifications and suspect ideology, not her sex. But there is something comical about their shock. After all, Bush administration officials and their allies in Congress have been using this same technique on the Democrats for years — and the conservatives in the party never saw fit to object.

Virtually every time the Democrats objected to one of Bush’s judicial nominees, the president’s allies accused them of discrimination…

The Republican Party has adopted the hair-trigger racial sensitivity of a campus diversity activist, except that its motivation is cynicism rather than genuine left-wing ideological fanaticism.

It’s funny that conservatives never objected to these smears when they were being deployed against the left, and even participated on occasion. In fact, they sometimes piled on themselves. (“Senate Democrats are blocking [Owen’s] nomination to a federal appeals court, not just because she is supposedly too conservative, but because she is too female,” wrote National Review Editor Rich Lowry last spring.) For some reason, they must have thought they could go after a Bush nominee and be spared its standard operating procedure for squashing judicial dissent. It’s not the first time they misjudged this administration.