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.
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.
This crazy election is unescapable. It even shows up on Gucci Mane’s Everybody Looking. In “Pussy Print” Gucci raps, “And I only featured Kanye / Cause we both some fuckin’ narcissists / Narcissistic tendencies with psychopathic pockets, bitch.” Does that sound like someone running for president? The hook in “Out Do Ya” is more relevant than ever: “How you let a nigga in the feds out do ya.” We are seven days away from this from this intense, dramatizing election, and if you can’t tune out of it, you might as well enjoy it. In addition, Gucci has such a distinctive flow that he can turn even his most nursery rhymes into artistic expression. In the second verse of “At Least A M,” he literally rhymes about alphabet letters:
I love to love the M
Gucci Mane a G
I’m from BC Bouldercrest
And I be scrapped up to the teeth
I used to have them P’s
I got em’ from AZ and I used to pay like one for em’ sell em’ for the three
RIP to E, how you let a nigga in a motherfucking wheelchair beat you to the cheese
You deserve a D
Y’all ain’t really flown but you post’ gettin’ up lil’ money but ain’t get money like me
I’m steady pushing three, or you can call it H
But ain’t no need to call me unless you got ninety G’s, I’m tryna’ make a B
You tryna’ make a play but get the fuck up out my face cause nigga you the MTD’s
You have to listen to him rap to appreciate his fucking genius.
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.
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.
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.
The 2016 election, more than any in recent memory, is a test for the legitimacy of the US political system, with profound implications for the liberal world order. Mrs Clinton carries enough baggage to fill a Boeing 747. She is not trusted by the majority of voters.
But she is manifestly more competent than Mr Trump whose braggadocio, divisiveness and meanness are on daily display. Despite her faults, Mrs Clinton is eminently qualified to be the first woman elected to the White House. She has the Financial Times’ endorsement.
What Clinton lacks in charisma she makes up for as a policy wonk. This should make her a better president than a candidate.
She has plans to help seniors and the impoverished with medical expenses; students with debt; parents with child care costs; small business with taxes; and our planet with progressive environmental policies. She strives to craft a humane version of immigration reform and reasonable gun safety laws. She may be too traditional a policymaker during a time when the people of American are starving for change, but she has demonstrated an ability to work with rivals to mend breaches.