Debra Pickett

Still, after reading the book and talking to Flanagan over the phone, I was determined not to take the bait. These hair-pulling girl-on-girl fights about which privileged lifestyle -- the debate seems to be between well-off professional women and well-off stay-at-home moms -- offers the greatest advantage for our next generation of overachievers have a tendency to get old quickly. And, as far as I know, no one on either side has managed to change the mind of anyone on the opposite side, anyway.

I sat on my feminist hands as Flanagan sounded off about how the women's movement had failed us all.

I said nothing -- OK, I did scream, "You're the devil!" while watching Flanagan on "The Colbert Report," but I was alone at the time so it doesn't really count -- about her weird glorification of 1950s-style "traditional" marriages in which men are the unquestioned heads of their households.

I even decided to refrain from remarking on the utter hypocrisy the way Flanagan celebrates domestic life when she has both a job and a staff of household help.

But when Flanagan declared, on "The Brian Lehrer Show" on public radio, that she understood why the United States had gone to war in Iraq and that, in fact, the whole thing could have been avoided if people had only listened to her, I just couldn't help myself. I had to write about it.

Flanagan's argument is that, in failing to embrace her message of stay-at-home superiority, presidential candidate Al Gore alienated legions of voters who might have elected him in 2000. And, if he'd won, the nation's foreign policy would be very different today.

This, you have to admit, is an incredibly neat trick on Flanagan's part. She is, she says, a lifelong Democrat, anti-war and pro-choice. But she is deeply angry at what she feels is the party's intolerance of views that don't toe the feminist line. Republicans, on the other hand, have been warm and incredibly welcoming to Flanagan, she says, even though she has many points of disagreement with them. This, she says, is why Republicans have been winning elections and Democrats have been losing them.

It's kind of funny how it's all about her, isn't it?

If she's wrong, I must be right

Personally, I don't buy into this line of reasoning. As I remember it, the main issues in the 2000 election were Elian Gonzales, Monica Lewinsky and whether Al Gore actually had invented the Internet.

But, beyond that, I did wonder if Flanagan -- despite sometimes seeming unbalanced, as when she shouted at a radio show caller to "stand down!" so she could continue her "and that's why we're in Iraq" monologue -- had a point about the nature of liberal America's stance on the nature of modern motherhood.

Have we become intolerant?

I'm appalled by Flanagan's smug assertion that her twin sons got "an immersion in the most powerful force on Earth: mother love" when she (and her full-time nanny) stayed home with them before they started nursery school, and its unspoken corollary that kids whose mothers held outside jobs somehow got a shallower dip in parental love.

But, at the same time, I find myself feeling unaccountably hostile towards the "opt-out" moms who, in moments of candor, admit that the decision to stay home had more to do with career frustration and burnout than with any particular philosophy of child rearing. I can't look at a highly educated professional woman who drops out of the work force without thinking she's making it just that much harder for the rest of us to convince our colleagues that we're serious about staying.

Like Caitlin Flanagan, I tend to make it all about me.

And maybe that's what accounts for the peculiar nastiness of the mommy wars: it's not just the personal-as-political. It's the political as very, very personal.

Perhaps it's time for a truce.

Maybe we need to stop passing judgment on each other and focus on the important truths on which we can agree.

Like how the war in Iraq is really all Monica Lewinsky's fault.