Dear Linda,

After listening to you on [conservative talk radio], I wondered what would make a person with your education and background so bitter and hostile. Educated people that I've had the pleasure of working with in my career, I have found have the talent to keep their personal emotions from showing through in their presentations. I don't find this with you ... odd, I thought.
You are to be appreciated for your passion, but that gets in the way of an objective presentation if the purpose of the presentation is to inform, educate and persuade. When the emotions direct the current of the talk, it weakens it to the point of having the speaker labeled a fanatic or kook. I don't think that is your intention - but that is how you come across.
Also your talent for a condescending tone when confronted leads me to feel that you have problems with criticism. Maybe a past childhood experience is resurfacing somehow. A condescending tone is a rather childish style and technique when the speaker realizes they are losing the argument or losing ground or losing control of the situation. I think you have too much education to rely on that technique to be effective.
I came away from the interview feeling sorry that a person of your background, it seems to me, has things in her past that is sabotaging her message. While your content maybe acceptable, the delivery is lacking. I am sure you can site volumes of references where you have spoken at wonderful places and to learned people who just adore you and hang on every word as though it was written in stone .... but I am one who follows the path that says if the emperor has no clothes, someone needs to tell him to minimize his embarrassment.
Have a wonderful day

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A Little from Linda

Dear Dr. Freud:

Your letter indeed helped make my (wonderful) day. I know that someone who listens to talk radio must indeed be looking for a dispassionate analysis of social issues. Certainly, my hosts' tones are a constant inspiration to me.
I receive a trickle of these "you must have a terrible life" letters. I assume the writers mean that anyone who disagrees with them must be depressed from their present or crazy from their childhood. It's sort of the secular version of "you haven't come to God," which I get from my religious talk show listeners. What is missing, of course, is just the faint possibility that I might believe what I speak and write as a rational, educated human thinker, trained as a lawyer to tailor my presentation to the context in which I am arguing.
I thought I would take this opportunity to reassure my readers that I had and have an absolutely great life.
But you already knew that.
L.