A reader offers advice:

Jonah,
I hope you will forward this to your E-mailer (Welcome to My World). It is
easy to come up with a million responses to that sort of thing if the person
isn’t a friend, but if the guy is a friend you have to let him down easy.
For whatever reason, nearly all my friends in Chicago are lefties and so I’m
well versed in this sort of thing. Here’s what you do: just ask
questions–one at a time. You can script questions that call for hours of
research, or else force him to go even further out on his limb. He’ll burn
out quickly enough, and don’t worry you don’t have to even read his
responses. Just read far enough so that you can ask one more question. The
key is that you only ask one question per E-mail.
Contradictions will probably pop up so ask him to explain those.
What sometimes happens is that the responses get crazier and crazier until
the point where you can say something like “So you believe that Saddam was
engaged to marry Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter and that’s why Bush had to
buy a new dog?”