Re Limbaugh v. Williamson, and the related issue of interacting with the Left, I’m with Kevin. My various day jobs have forced me to do it for, oh, the past 40 years now, as I’ve worked in newspapers, magazines, publishing, and now Hollywood. Several of the comments on Kevin’s post imply that if “true conservatives” interact with folks such as Bill Maher (whom I like, both personally and professionally), we will somehow become corrupted by that very interaction. As Milton writes in the Areopagitica:

Dionysius Alexandrinus was about the year 240 a person of great name in the Church for piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much against heretics by being conversant in their books; until a certain presbyter laid it scrupulously to his conscience, how he durst venture himself among those defiling volumes. The worthy man, loath to give offence, fell into a new debate with himself what was to be thought; when suddenly a vision sent from God (it is his own epistle that so avers it) confirmed him in these words: read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou are sufficient both to judge aright and to examine each matter. . . .
To the pure, all things are pure; not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled… Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.

Translation: If you’re not corruptible by the other side’s argument, you’ll be just fine. But you must listen to what they have to say, weigh it, evaluate it in light of your own beliefs, which constantly need to be challenged for them to hold true. Milton again, quoting Paul to the Thessalonians:

Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.

As I said on the NR cruise last year, if you work in those fields of cultural engagement that conservatives traditionally shun and you don’t have any friends on the left, you are going to be very lonely and very unemployed. Very ignorant, too.

P.S. I also like Jay Carney, an old Time magazine friend and colleague, and I wish him well in an impossible job. So there.