“Clinton’s public record is long, deep, scrutinized, and hacked,” writes Ezra Klein, “Trump’s record is thinner, shorter, and protected by secrecy and NDAs.” He points out the irony of openness:

There’s an irony to Clinton’s relationship with the press, Aftergood observes. “She tries to keep things secret, and that leads to their ultimate disclosure. People make accusations against her, and the effort to refute them leads to more disclosure.” The result is someone who seems secretive — who perhaps is secretive — but who has ended up divulging more information about her personal life, her political operation, her policy process, her daily schedule, and her financial dealings than any candidate in memory. Yet we react less to the information we get than to her reluctance to release it and her demeanor when she does — we prize the performance of openness more than the openness itself.

It’s all about perception. When you act secretive, people will assume that you have something to hide. When you act openly, they don’t question your secrecy. I hope this lesson won’t cost Hillary the election and our country four years of nightmares.

Robin Lakoff on Hillary’s Emailgate:

Clinton has repeatedly apologized, but apparently not enough for her accusers. In fact, her apologies were her only mistake. By apologizing she acknowledged guilt. But that’s what women are supposed to do (because women are always guilty of something). Several members of her own staff sent emails grumbling that she was a recalcitrant apologizer. But her instinct was right: apologizing has only made her weaker. Her opponent never apologizes, not really. So accusations slide off his back like water off a duck’s.

Louis C.K. explains eloquently why we need the first mother in the White House:

It’s really exciting to have the first mother in the White House. It’s not about the first woman, it’s about the first mom… A mother just does it. She feeds you and teaches you, she protects you, she takes care of shit. We’ve had 240 years of fathers: Bald father, fat father, every kind of father. Fathers are OK. A great father can give a kid 40 percent of his needs—top. Any mother, just a shit mother, just a not even trying mother—200 percent.

He concludes:

We need just a tough bitch mother who nobody likes. If you vote for Hillary, you’re a grownup. If you vote for Trump, you’re a sucker. If you don’t vote for anybody, you’re an asshole.

You heard it right. Don’t be an asshole, and definitely don’t be a sucker. You know what to do.

KKK National Director Thomas Robb writes:

While Trump wants to make America great again, we have to ask ourselves, “What made America great in the first place?” The short answer to that is simple: America was great not because of what our forefathers did – but because of who our forefathers were. America was founded as a White Christian Republic.

Trump earned this endorsement.

Nicholas Lemann:

People in politics love to quote from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”; Clinton seems to exemplify its famous maxim that in order to win you have to know both yourself and your enemy. She realizes that she doesn’t have the spectacular political talent of her husband or of Barack Obama, and she makes up for it by being obsessively prepared and organized.

On Hillary’s characters, Lemann writes:

Clinton’s biggest mistakes, like setting up her private e-mail server, spring from excessive fear and caution, rather than excessive confidence. She works hard and doesn’t give up. She attends to details. She doesn’t have an exaggerated sense of her own powers. She seems unlikely to believe that she can remake vast swaths of the world with one or two bold strokes, as George W. Bush did after the 9/11 attacks. And, as this summer and fall have shown, she can expertly defenestrate an adversary when the situation calls for it. None of this may thrill those of us watching her campaign, but these aren’t bad qualities in a Presidential candidate, or, for that matter, in a President.

Amy Davidson:

Paul Ryan does seem to be conflicted. But, on the basis of the evidence, the conflict is not between his principles and his partisan obligations but between his intellectual vanity and his opportunism. He is not emblematic of a party that got hijacked but of one that hoped to simultaneously achieve a radical agenda, play to its base’s worst fears, and still be celebrated in polite society. And that is not, in the end, a very interesting study in character. Paul Ryan may just be a very ordinary politician.

Not just an ordinary politician, Ryan is Trump’s little bitch.

Claudia Eller and Andrew Wallenstein:

For the first time in its 111-year history, Variety is endorsing a presidential candidate — Hillary Clinton. While it is commonplace for mass-market newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post to endorse candidates, that’s not the case for trade publications. But this year, the editors-in-chief and our publisher, Michelle Sobrino-Stearns, feel strongly that we should buck tradition and take a public stance on this historic election; for the same reason that The Atlantic endorsed Clinton (marking only the third time since its 1857 founding to back a candidate), we didn’t want to sit on the sidelines and come down on the wrong side of history.

Editorial Board:

The bitterness of this campaign has sometimes made it difficult to remember the substantive differences between the candidates, or to believe their acrimonious contest will even end.

But end it will, and a vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton will move the nation at least incrementally down the path of reconciliation, equitable economic growth and international stability.

Jeffrey C. Isaac:

She is being attacked by the right wing because the right wing hates her. And the right wing hates her because she is a liberal and a feminist and a woman and because she supports the things that most anger the right wing: gender equality, reproductive freedom, equality for gays and lesbians, gun control, racial equality, and civil rights.

These things that she supports are the things that we support. The things she supports have their limits. She has her limits. But she is not evil, and she is not an enemy.

This article is a must-read for the Democrats.

Jill Filipovic opens:

The first woman is just days away from (probably) being elected president of the United States, and so of course her candidacy has been fraught by two guys obsessed with their own penises, including one whose last name is literally Weiner. If there’s one lesson to draw from this historic election, it’s that even women a hair away from the most powerful position in the world can still see themselves quickly derailed by badly behaved men.

And she ends:

The great irony of it all is that little else could make a better case for putting more women in positions of power—women can be as craven, evil, and corrupt as men, but rarely do they act so pathetically like adolescent boys, distracting from the real issues with lizard-brained sexual stupidity. Yet here we are, in an election of historic feminist significance, and we aren’t talking about the hard-earned power of a groundbreaking woman. Instead, the hard-ons of has-been men and the hard heads of quietly powerful ones might just screw Clinton’s shot at the White House.

I refuse to let this happen to our first female president.