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It's because your column often reads less like a column and more like an amalgamation of political stump speeches and talk radio. You're trying to be everything to everyone. When it gives you credibility you assume the mantle of academia, but are quick to take jabs at the "elite university intelligentsia" when trying to score points with the anti-intellecutal right. You almost always (including in this column) bring up the fact that you're from a middle class, Italian-American upbringing as a way to bash "coastal liberal elites" but even the briefest self-reflection would squarely put you in that camp that you so disdain; a professor at an arts university in a major Northeastern city.
You assume that your history as a feminist and an out lesbian automatically allows you to speak for the left, but then ritually deride "the left" and gay rights organizations giving credence to criticisms only coming from the weakest of right wing sources.
You knowingly take on the role of "gadfly" but refuse to do the job properly - your flawed logic and factual cherry picking, combined with your folksy "don't we all just know this is true?" delivery are far more reminiscent of radio talk show hosts than intelligent columnists.
Being an academic I'm forced to wonder whether you hold your professional work to the same frighteningly low standard that you do for you commercial work. Perhaps tenure has made you intellectually lazy, but I would fail a first year graduate student if they submitted work to me of a similar quality to what you routinely publish. It's biased, inaccurate, often unsourced, poorly researched and displays only the most cursory examinations into the topics at hand. I only hope that this is just a fun pastime for you and not indicative of your university as a whole. It's frankly embarrassing.
You have the audience and the standing to be an extraordinarily effective gadfly and challenge all sorts of different forms of conventional wisdom, but you can't accomplish that by cutting corners and not doing your homework. That's how politicians get elected, not how real intellectual work is done.
