A Charles Krauthammer column was the topic of debate between some republican friends and me this weekend. It’s convincing, at first, but fails to consider one obvious possibility: That liberals are stupid AND conservatives are evil.

Allow me to explain. Your daily interactions with other people are in fact little positive sum games, or prisoner dilemmas. If you go into these games trusting the other party at all times (the conservative criticism of liberals), the other party will quickly learn that it can take advantage of you by making a selfish choice rather than the cooperative choice. You lose, and you are stupid for it.

If you go into these games making the selfish choice at all times, you preempt any chance of building a history of trust and benefiting from cooperation, and instead you head for a race to the bottom, friendless and unloved for initiating a Hobbesian nightmare of a world. You are evil, indeed.

In fact, the smartest tactic lies between the two, and it has been documented by evolutionary psychologists as the dominant form in which primates (and humans) interact in a social context. Because you play lots and lots of positive sum games with the individuals that you come into daily contact with, there is plenty of opportunity to reward cooperation and punish selfish defections. What you do is you trust the other party the first time; all subsequent times, you make the same choice (cooperative or selfish) that the other party did the last time. If the other party was selfish last time (because he/she is a conservative), you are selfish back the next time. If the other party was a liberal, you continue trusting them and behaving cooperatively. Let’s call it enlightened liberalism.

Interestingly, this tactic allows for educating conservatives, because they will soon learn that if they stop behaving selfishly, you will trust them again, and you will both benefit from the extra rewards brought on by cooperation. Yep, conservatives may be evil, but they’re not stupid.

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Is this a clever ploy by the Wall Street Journal to make democrats look stupid? Whine, whine, whine. Mr. McGovern seems to be under the impression that we care about the minutiae of his luddite existence. Perhaps if somebody bought him a Palm Pilot he’d be on time. Is one of the perks of being a failed presidential candidate the civil right to have airline employees risk their job for you to do you a favor because you’re late and you’re insulting them? And is Mr. McGovern suggesting he is immune to traffic laws? I’m glad to see that every man is equal in the eyes of US airlines. It’s part of what makes the war on terrorism worth fighting.

A mere 37 days after my entirely facetious prediction, comes the headline: Ailing Man Sues Fast-Food Firms

Today’s Ha’aretz editorial calls the Gaza strike an act of state-sponsored terrorism. I don’t agree, but only because I like to quibble semantically about the proper use of the term “terrorism”–the word should be used to describe acts that deliberately aim to inspire terror in a civilian population. Within this narrow definition, terrorism is what happened on Sept 11, and what Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs Bridgade do when they send out a suicide bomber.

What Sharon is guilty of is pursuing a military objective with wanton disregard for civilian life. His mindset is the same mindset that allowed Hiroshima and Dresden. Of course, the Gaza strike is much smaller in scope, and if you don’t condemn Allied actions over Hiroshima and Dresden then you cannot condemn Sharon without being a hypocrite. But Hiroshima and Dresden had one thing going for them–they did shorten the war, whereas the Gaza strike will not.

The moral difference between terrorism and what Sharon ordered is small, though. If you know with certainty your actions will cause civilian casualties way out of proportion with any military or political objective, then intent is irrelevant. If you order a missile strike on a city block, civilian casualties are not a mistake.

Meanwhile, here is the ‘My country, right or wrong’ defense, in the Jerusalem Post. It’s written by Uri Dan, who also wrote the Bull’s Eye story for the New York Post. I don’t know about you, but I can’t really tell the difference between his op-ed pieces and his straightforward news reporting.

As usual, the details of what went wrong are messy.