>Since, as Noam Chomsky
>among others have noted, only a very select group of people have access to
>the NYT Op-Ed page, wouldn't it be more politically useful for Butler to
>use this privilege to publically intervene in these debates rather than
>expend her capital revenging herself on her conservative detractors?
I doubt very much the NYT would have given her op-ed space except to respond to this specific attack.
Here's a taste of how the NYT op-ed process works. My friend Dan Lazare wrote an op-ed piece thrashing the U.S. constitutional system (which he's done at length in his book The Frozen Republic and in an article in New Left Review #232, to which Michael Lind responds in #233). One of the op-ed editors was interested, but she said they wanted to run it past Anthony Lewis and Ronald Dworkin, who stand for everything Dan write against. Of course they didn't like it, and the piece never ran.
Doug