Truth

I couldn't figure out a way to embed it, but Ezra Klein had probably the most insightful tweet of the last 24 hours:

"If Donald Trump wanted the wall, he'd have negotiated away something of value to get it. Or at least tried to do so. He doesn't want the wall. He wants the fight over the wall. He wants to be seen going to war over the wall. That's what tonight is about."

Regrettably, I am unable to figure out how to embed the tweet here, so I kind of feel like I'm plagiarizing. However, I think that this is spot on and relates to my post yesterday. It is very revealing to hear how much people are willing to give up to get or keep something; it tells one a lot about how much the thing is worth to the person who wants it.

As a telling anecdote, I took a plaintiff's case a few years ago that I turned out to be a total "pig," i.e. there wasn't a lot of merit or money to it. Nonetheless, I demanded about ten times what I thought it was worth, and the defendant wound up offering about five times what I had prepared my client to accept. Obviously, the case settled. Perhaps the case was worth more to the defendant than me, or perhaps the defendant knew something I didn't. Either way, the settlement offer was telling.

So too in the present situation. As a proud progressive, I see an opportunity to extract something from the president. I would take that opportunity were I in Congress. I don't really care about "the wall" one way or another; I think it's pretty stupid, but in all honesty, $5.6B is a rounding error in a budget expected to be approximately $4.4T. To be clear, this $5.6B would represent approximately 0.0012% of the budget.

Nonetheless, I think it's a stupid vanity project, and I am disinclined to give one to a president who has governed not on my behalf but seemingly in a constant effort to piss me off and offend my sensibilities.

Imagine for a moment that the neighbor who you can't stand needed your permission to do something. Even if you don't care, you bet your a$$ you're going to extract a price from the annoying neighbor. If the neighbor wasn't willing to pay any price to do that "something," said unwillingness probably says a lot about how badly the neighbor actually wants that "something," wouldn't it?