The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gap Fest for September 12th, 2019, the last mustache in Washington edition.

I am David Plotz of Atlas of Scura.

That mild chuckle was from John Dickerson of

CBS of 60 Minutes. Hello, John in New York. I take it. Hi. Yeah. And I've got a mustache-related

question after we do the introduction. Great. Love mustache questions. Emily Bazelon of the New

York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School joins us from Houston, Texas, where she is there, and she's going to see the Democratic presidential debate tonight.

Hello, Emily.

Yeah, I think I got a press pass. If all goes well, you know me, I could show up and knock it in for some reason. But that is the idea.

Now, Emily, are you going to be in the hall or are you going to be in the filing center? If I get there in time to pick up my press credential, I think I can be in the filing center. Is that where I should be? I got this email that I didn't understand. Well, should is an interesting question in that context, because, I mean mean if you're in the hall you see what's

in the hall and that's what only like 200 other people see if you're in the filing center you

experience it more like america except you experience it like america only if america was sitting

in a bubble of campaign reporters oh i want to be in the hall the filing center will just stress me

out yeah now if you're in the hall you'll miss that moment that everybody goes, oh, my God, you're when, you know, X happened in this cutaway, which you won't see, because it'll be like an actual theater performance. But that's not without it. It's fun, too, because you'll get to see all the stuff that happens behind the scenes scenes like all the candidates making that strange gesticulations they make to try to get the moderator to call on them next oh i want to see that okay thank you i'm so glad we had this conversation boring the entire planet or we can cut it boring the entire all of our hundreds of thousands of listeners today in, in debate watching tips from John Dickerson.

It was really helpful.

That's going to be our special side podcast.

On today's episode, in a presidency characterized by bizarre governance, this is one of the weird, weird weeks.

We have a president canceling secret negotiations by tweet and despoiling the weather forecast by Sharpie.

We will talk about that.

Then John Bolton is leaving as national security advisor.

Is America safer because of that?

Then we'll talk about a great new book from Paul Tuft, The Years that Matter Most, a book about the college admissions process.

...