Frank Foer writes (Reg Req’d):

The widespread conservative discomfort with the Bush domestic agenda and the Iraq war has yet to bubble over. But the Miers debate gives every reason to believe that it will. Watching conservative bloggers and columnists join the Miers controversy has provided an important object lesson in social anthropology. After years of eviscerating every critic of Bush, sites like The Corner have followed their herd mentality in the exact opposite direction. (Only now that The Corner has plunged into this internecine warfare, which happens to jibe with the political interests of liberals, its atmosphere gets roundly described as intellectually honest.)

Me: One could easily play an “oh yeah” game and go pointing out the herd mentality at TNR. Instead, let me just explain one thing to my old friend Frank. The Corner isn’t a “site.” It’s a part of NRO and NRO is part of NR. And NR and NRO and many of the writers for the Corner have criticized Bush on a very long list of things since the first days of the Presidency. Obviously, we’ve supported Bush and criticized his liberal critics often. But I think it’s fair to say that we honestly believed much of the criticism was idiotic independent of any tendencies toward groupthink here.

Indeed, Frank knows this. Just a couple paragraphs earlier in his piece he called Ramesh one of the two most incisive conservative journalists (the other being George Will). Frank noted that Ramesh had criticized Bush two years ago. Frank writes: “Well before Harriet Miers, Ponnuru delivered a long list of ideological betrayals: from the imposition of steel tariffs to new accounting regulations to the creation of a new Cabinet department.” (I’ve run through that same list many times in print myself). Ramesh is a senior editor of the magazine. Ramesh also writes for the Corner. So, was Ramesh caving into the herd mentality around here when he criticized Miers in the Corner or was he being intellectually consistent in his willingness to criticize Bush?