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All these filmmakers’ needy, importunate wooing of their writers — and their eventual dickering over script credit — makes their courtship of actual women such as Candice Bergen or Amy Irving look halfhearted by comparison.

But nothing said at this point can be separated from the bluffing and haggling and dickering central to such high-dollar negotiations.

Trouble was, Biden couldn’t make it clear to the public that he was willing to dicker — but only over the budget, not the nation’s credit-worthiness.

One reason is the endless, costly dickering among middlemen like Envision and UnitedHealth to make sure they get their share of the bucks sloshing around in the system.

That opened the process to almost infinite legal dickering.