Dec. 11, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
13:07
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| *Cough* *Cough* Hey everybody! | |
| Get in here. It's breaking news. | |
| That news is breaking hard. | |
| I hope you're all watching over on C-SPAN. They've got the Google hearings. | |
| And the CEO of Google is doing his hearings. | |
| And behind the Google CEO is an activist dressed as the monopoly millionaire guy. | |
| As activism goes, that's some real good activism. | |
| So look for the monopoly man behind the CEO of Google at the hearings today. | |
| Let's talk about wall funding. | |
| So the president just had a press conference with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, in which they started sort of negotiating in public in front of the press. | |
| And Nancy Schumer said, you know, let's not negotiate in front of the press, blah, blah, blah. | |
| Now, if you're not up to date on what the problem is with the wall funding, I would like to explain it to you in a two-person skit in which I will play President Trump and the part of everybody else, Nancy and Chuck Schumer, will be played by Dale. | |
| And it goes like this. | |
| We need strong border security. | |
| I will shut down the government. | |
| I also want strong border security. | |
| Well, I want strong border security. | |
| I want strong border security, and I'll give you money for it. | |
| Well, I want money for strong border security. | |
| Oh yeah? I'm shutting down the government for that. | |
| You're not going to get money for strong border security. | |
| Instead, what we've offered you is money for strong border security. | |
| If you don't take it, I'm going to shut down the government. | |
| Or something like that. | |
| Now, of course, this substantive conversation about border security has really turned into an argument about whether they can or cannot use the words wall. | |
| I suppose if you call the defense, everybody would be happy. | |
| But the Democrats can't allow the president to have a political victory. | |
| And here's a question I ask myself. | |
| Why can't they negotiate in public? | |
| I can see lots of topics that you would not want to negotiate in public. | |
| For example, trade negotiations. | |
| You definitely don't want to do that in public. | |
| Decisions on national defense. | |
| You did not want to do that in public. | |
| Discussions about how to change a law, you know, that's in discussion. | |
| That's too brainstormy. | |
| You don't want any of that stuff in public because people will just be throwing in ideas. | |
| It's too early. There are lots of things I would not want to see negotiated in public. | |
| But this one thing, the question of the wall and border security, I really want that negotiated in public. | |
| Why not? You could make a good argument there are lots of things to not negotiate in public, and the public is better served by that. | |
| But this is not one of those. | |
| This is a situation that the public is perfectly capable of understanding, and all the brainstorming has been done. | |
| We know what all the options are. | |
| We basically understand the entire topic, thanks to talking about it for three years. | |
| So, as a citizen, I request of my government that this absolutely should be negotiated in public, period. | |
| The border security should be negotiated in public. | |
| And I want to see how they get around their choice of words, whether it's a wall or a fence. | |
| I want to see the President of the United States Ask Chuck and Nancy, in public, do you think that a solid wall and a fence are equally good protection? | |
| I want to see him say, suppose we have different solutions for different places, but for the important parts, where there's the biggest problem, is it okay if we use the best technology? | |
| How about if the president simply said this? | |
| Negotiating in public. | |
| Well, Chuck and Nancy, neither you nor I are experts on construction of walls and fences and what to do. | |
| How about we make this deal? | |
| Give us X amount of money and our experts will decide where it needs to be a wall and where it needs to be something else. | |
| Why don't we not act like we're good at that, because we're politicians, and why don't we let the experts decide where to put a wall? | |
| I would love to see this negotiated in public. | |
| Trump is likely an expert. | |
| Well, Trump knows construction, but who is an expert on building barriers on the border? | |
| That's a pretty small expertise. | |
| The other thing that was hilarious about this is I saw the press, whatever you'd call it, talking to Pelosi and Schumer afterwards, and Pelosi and Schumer were arguing these technical budget things It sounded like, well, we've offered a CR like last year, but the continuing resolutions of the process... | |
| And I'm just listening to it, and I'm going, uh, I really don't know what you're saying. | |
| We don't care about these budget details. | |
| And then the president says, we need a wall. | |
| It's like watching him club baby harp seals. | |
| It's just not a fair fight. | |
| Wall, good communicating, good persuasion. | |
| It's visual. It's, you know, everybody knows what a wall is. | |
| Chuck Schumer, well, we promised last time, and why isn't this as good as last time, when last time we did a CR, and you all know what a CR is, but sometimes you do these in packages, and we had agreed last year, so why isn't the stuff we agreed with last year all... | |
| Versus we did a wall. | |
| This is not a fair fight. | |
| So let's negotiate this wall thing in public. | |
| And if the president doesn't want to do it with Nancy and Chuck, how about proxies? | |
| I would love to see somebody else who actually knows what they're talking about negotiate it in public. | |
| How about Just a Republican who knows what they're talking about and a Democrat who knows what they're talking about. | |
| Let's have them debate it. | |
| Now, the worst way to do that would be to put them on a two-minute segment on one of the news shows. | |
| They yell at each other, they interrupt, and then time runs out. | |
| I want a good hour show, could be on C-SPAN or something, in which somebody who actually knows what they're talking about, maybe they've got some backups with them, you know, somebody who can do some fact-checking in real time, And you've got a moderator. | |
| And you say, alright, alright. | |
| Should we have a wall everywhere? | |
| What do you two say about that? | |
| And do you agree that some walls are good in some places? | |
| Do you both agree with that? | |
| In fact, I'll do it. | |
| How about I do it? | |
| I will moderate the wall budget questions. | |
| I'm actually qualified for this. | |
| My corporate jobs for years, it was exactly this. | |
| It was negotiating budgets. | |
| So it was my job to talk to the department heads and negotiate how much their budget was and make it all work under the larger budget. | |
| So I could do that. | |
| I'll moderate. | |
| And here's the thing. | |
| I'm not even sure I have a bias. | |
| I don't think I have necessarily a bias on this topic. | |
| Because to me it's a technical question. | |
| It's not a political question. | |
| It's just what works. | |
| You have both sides agreeing. | |
| That they want something that works for border security. | |
| So the critical part of the disagreement is no disagreement at all. | |
| Everybody wants good border security. | |
| So I don't have any kind of political bias that would be relevant because everybody's on the same side to begin with. | |
| There are just some questions about how much would it cost? | |
| How long would it take? Is a wall as good as a fence? | |
| Just technical stuff. | |
| I could have this solved in 24 hours. | |
| Put me on camera with two experts who know what they're talking about, and I'll have this all sorted out in 24 hours. | |
| The only people who can't solve this are the people who have a political stake in it. | |
| So the president has such a strong You know, political motivation about calling it a wall, and the Democrats have such a strong political motivation to not call it a wall. | |
| That's actually the only remaining problem. | |
| Do you get that? | |
| That our government is displaying a level of incompetence that I don't believe we've ever seen. | |
| This might be the new highest level of incompetence, at least one that we can understand as voters. | |
| We don't understand everything they do, so you can't really tell if they've done something wrong, because you don't know exactly what they're doing and what's the right thing to do. | |
| But in this wall situation, we know that both sides agree. | |
| We know that the money is available. | |
| You have two people agreeing with each other as hard as they can. | |
| That's a very unusual situation. | |
| They just want to use different words for things. | |
| If you had a situation in which people agreed on the fundamentals and the only thing they were arguing about is how you express it and what you talk about and how you persuade and what words you use, that's all it's down to. | |
| Who would you call to help you solve that problem? | |
| Yeah, you'd call me. | |
| I'm not qualified to do everything. | |
| The list of things I'm not qualified for is infinite. | |
| The number of things I am qualified to do compared to all the things that people can do is very small. | |
| My total collection of skills is very small compared to all the things one could be skilled at. | |
| But this? This is exactly what I do. | |
| This is what I do. | |
| I figure out how two people who are in complete agreement can present their, you know, present their case in a way that breaking the coal there was an incoming coal. | |
| All right. First time watching me live? | |
| Well, it just gets better and better, doesn't it? | |
| Trump promised Mexico was going to pay for the wall. | |
| Well, that wasn't really the important part of the wall, was it? | |
| So apparently money is no longer the problem because the Democrats have promised money. |
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