>That said, I find it disconcerting that she is singled out for contempt when
>there are plenty of other talented writers with shallow left politics (Gore
>Vidal and Norman Mailer come to mind) who aren't held to such a high
>standard. In fact, their crankiness is often taken as a charming
>curmudgeonly virtue.
Not by me. I don't know enough about Mailer to comment, but Vidal seems to me to be an upper-class nativist and xenophobe of the sort that leftists are too soft on. I interviewed him hours after Pim Fortuyn was shot - he hadn't heard about it until I told him - and his first reaction was that the killer was probably a homophobe. He added that Europeans are right to be concerned about protecting the integrity of their culture. He also flirts with anti-Semitism and conspiracism. He's a witty writer, but a rather foul person (his memoirs gave me the creeps - he said he'd never loved anyone since a prep school crush who died young, and that seeing a lover's erection made him lose his own). I'd keep my distance from him.
Doug