[Rockingham]

You assume that one's public persona as an author always reveals the true person. Sometimes that is true, of course. Truman Capote was a flaming homo, Thomas Wolfe as troubled as his novels suggest, and Norman Mailer is actually the blustering windbag he seems to be.

Yet there are other cases, such as Willa Cather's covert lesbianism being unrevealed in her writings, which movingly described the love between a man and a woman in "My Antonia" and a saintly pioneer priest in "Death Comes for the Archbishop." And Einstein, the prototypical modern scientific sage, ditched an inconvenient wife and retarded child for brutally selfish reasons and sometimes embarrassed himself with other physicists by getting his own theories wrong.

As for Ann, I know her background and have seen her speak in person and on TV, and have read most of her books and many columns and articles. She seems utterly consistent, sincere, and well thought out in her rhetorical strategies. I believe that her sharp-tongued and uncuddly public persona is the natural result of being an open conservative at University of Michigan and Yale Law School. Boot camp lasts six weeks and changes, but Ann had seven years of practice in take-no-prisoners, against-all-comers argumentation in hostile terrain. After that, she was a federal law clerk, a lawyer at the conservative Center for Individual Rights, and went through Stan Evans' finishing school for conservative journalists.

With Ann, I am reminded of the learned and humane Samuel Johnson's lifelong love of coffeehouse arguments. After one particularly long and contentious evening, a satisfied Johnson commented to Boswell on the way home that he had enjoyed himself immensely. "Yes," Boswell replied, "you tossed and gored all comers." Do not let the piles of tossed and gored liberals make you think that Ann is somehow an aberrant personality. I have no doubt that the private person would be of different manner and well worth knowing.

[Al Simmons]

Wow. While you literary allusions are embarassingly lost on me the remainder of your post is very wise and though-provoking.

But kindly answer my question: Would you want your daughter acting like Ann?

[timsbella]

Thoughtful - excellent commentary.