Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, August 1st.

I'm Emily Bazlon.

I'm here in Washington with David Plotz, and John Dickerson is with us, joined from some remote undisclosed location.

Hey, John.

Hi.

So I want to start by saying thank you to everyone who enjoyed our

slug fest last week. I have to also confess that I felt just humiliated about how much

cursing I did on that slug fest. I really didn't know when we started yelling at each other that

we were going to air this or I would never have been.

I think it's ridiculous that you're apologizing for that.

I think it's totally ridiculous.

We're journalists our entire job.

The whole point of being a journalist is that you curse all the time.

And our listeners should know, those of you with delicate sensibilities, close your ears.

But in fact, most of the time in the slate office, people are cursing because journalists curse. It's like a, that's a, it's a habit of the job. It doesn't mean that it doesn't, but it doesn't mean that we curse at home. It doesn't mean that we curse in front of our children as some of our listeners wondered about. Right, we weren't intending you to play that for your kids.

I don't know.

Why is it?

Why do journalists, I think it's because we like to think of ourselves as the salt of the earth, right? Even though we're really not. You mean salty language? Salty language, salt of the earth. It goes together. That does two different things. I just think it's the, you know, it's a job which is based on a certain kind of verbal aggression.

And cursing is a shorthand for that. And we also like precision of words. And sometimes certain things can only be expressed with a well-placed expletive. Well, maybe. I don't know. I felt extremely unladylike. But so it goes. This week we're going to start, of course, by talking about politics. So John McCain and Barack Obama have been smacking each other around this week in a variety of ads. John, catch us up a little bit.

Well, you know, the smacking has mostly been all on McCain's part. I guess we talked about this a little bit last week,

and we certainly wrote about it in slate, that McCain has felt that the press hasn't been

doing its job going after Obama, so he's going to have to do it. And in the last roughly two

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