A few months before 9-11, some guests at a social gathering were chortling over the malapropisms of George W. Bush. Others scowled. This exercise was petty and tiresome, they said.

“I seem to remember you Clinton-haters doing the same thing over his sexual peccadillos,” came a retort.

Someone expressed a wish that Bush would fail because if he succeeded, it would mean another four years of Bush. The logic seemed to be that it would be better for America to go downhill than for a Republican to get credit for success.

The subject of Ronald Reagan came up. Someone said he was the incarnation of stupidity. Someone else gave him credit for winning the Cold War and for the longest economic boom in American history.

A joke was made about Reagan’s boast of having saved 100 lives when he was a lifeguard. What about Al Gore’s claim to have invented the Internet and to have worked as a youth behind a mule-drawn plow, a Reagan man wanted to know.

“Can you give me one good reason why the inheritance tax should be repealed?” another guest asked out of the blue.

“Why should the government should get your money?” someone else blurted out.

“If it weren’t for inheritance taxes, we’d become a plutocracy,” came an answer. Someone ventured the argument that that inheritance taxes force the breaking up of small businesses.

“There has never been a single case of a small business being broken up by inheritance taxes,” a voice of authority said. Was that true? No one had the evidence to contradict him.

A meditative type who’d stood on the sidelines lamented that everyone’s mind is closed and that we’re all prisoners of our prejudices. But when someone referred to the Wall Street Journal, he grimaced. “I refuse to even look at the Wall Street Journal,” he said.

Someone spoke of Kansas as a “high tax” state. A couple of gentlemen whose livelihood depends on the state shouted him down. If the state’s taxes were high enough, it wouldn’t have to cut programs, they said.

This scenario is a “composite,” but you get the point. Passions run higher than common sense where politics is concerned and our ideologies are often window dressing for our self-interests. The slighter the differences between us, the greater the animosities, for some strange reason. And truth usually lies somewhere in between. But partisans are more interested in winning an argument than in discovering the truth.

How much should we be taxed? “A good shepherd shears his flock; he does not flay them,” said the Roman emperor Tiberius when some governors petitioned for a tax increase. If the state pays your salary, gives you grants or subsidies, you may think taxes can’t be too high. Frederic Bastiat’s observation is the bottom line: “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Most of us carry a quiver of pet arguments, factoids and opinions that justify our desires and actions. If they’re not true, they ought to be, from our point of view.

The woman who shows up for her welfare check driving a Cadillac fact or figment? What about global warming? A new study published in the journal Nature “shows cooling, rather than warming, on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000.” But the World Resources Institute warns that global warming threatens future Winter Olympic Games.

What’s the truth? It depends on your agenda and the facts you select. Do Enron’s political contributions illustrate business trying to buy politicians, or politicians extorting tribute from business? Is “campaign reform” an attempt to protect elected politicians from corruption or from challengers?

George Bush identifies Iran as part of an “axis of evil.” But an article in the New Yorker cites an Iranian college professor: “Bush himself orchestrated the September 11 attacks. He did not really win the election, and this was a way to unite the nation behind him.”

“There are fourteen dozen different positions on each issue in Iran,” according to an American observer in the same article. You could say that about any place on earth. There are a lot of different “truths” running around.

One thing we can all agree on is that terrorists are the incarnations of evil, right? Not so fast. Caleb Carr says that anyone who attacks civilians is a terrorist. That would include not only al-Qaida, but “General William Tecumseh Sherman torching Atlanta, carpet-bombing Cambodia, razing Dresden, nuking Hiroshima,” according to a review of Carr’s new book, “The Lessons of Terror.”

Everyone believes his cause is just. Everyone believes he is “uniquely aggrieved,” wrote the reviewer. In war almost everyone practices some kind of terror. We don’t need the courage of our convictions but courage for an attack on our convictions, some philosopher said. “Them” aren’t that different from “us.”

George Gurley, who lives in rural Baldwin, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.