Why is Hillary still being attacked?

What, still?

There are reasons the Republicans are still attacking Hillary.

You’d think they’d stop. She lost the election in 2016 (well, at least, she’s not president, and Trump is). She holds no elected office. She’s said she’s not going to run for any office anymore. She’s not even in charge of anything. She doesn’t run the Clinton Foundation, or the Democratic Party, or a rotary club somewhere, or even a pizza delivery service. So what’s the deal?

Especially since there are better targets. So-called “journalists” are falling over themselves to interview Bernie Sanders. His supporters want him to run for president again in 2020. He’s still a sitting senator. He’s part of Tom Perez’s “Unity Tour”. To hear the buzz, Sanders is The Future Of The Democratic Party. Yet Republicans don’t seem to give a damn about him. What’s up with that?

Republicans are all about attacking Hillary. They want Attorney General Sessions to investigate her for a buyout of a uranium mining company she had nothing to do with, and for someone else’s investigation into emails Republicans have already investigated eight or ten times. Trump keeps tweeting angry things about her. It’s as if she’s still relevant. Why? What accounts for the obsession?

From my perspective, there are three reasons Republicans concentrate on Hillary and not on Bernie.

1. It’s all about the clicks. Republicans want to use Hillary as a distraction from their own criminality, from the massive fraud that is the Trump Administration, and from the devastation the Republican Party wants to wreak upon America. People pay attention to Hillary. The “news” media pays attention to Hillary. Bernie is boring. Bernie wouldn’t serve their purpose. This begs the question of why Hillary so so interesting, but I’ll get there.
2. GOPers love to hate her. The right-wing insanity farms go absolutely batshit when Hillary is mentioned. It’s a way to excite excitement. Running against Hillary brings out the torch-wielding mobs, riles up the base, and makes donations pour in. The drooling zombie mobs don’t care about Bernie. He doesn’t bring the gold. Again, the question of why this is true demands an answer.
3. Hillary is still a threat. The Republican establishment and the Bannon Nazis see Hillary as a real and present danger to their desire to establish a neo-feudal fascist state. Hillary is not merely useful as a distraction and as a scare tactic to bring in money. She’s one of the most stalwart bastions against Trumpism. Bernie, on the other hand, is impotent and unimportant. So they ignore him.

Of these three, the most important is the third. Republicans care, more than anything else, about getting reelected. If they see their position being threatened, they’ll go all-out to secure it. The first two points are simply in service to the third.

If Hillary wasn’t the biggest threat to Republican dominance, they’d concentrate on whoever was. Yes, Hillary is popular with press, and brings in the dollars — but Republicans are impressively disciplined in their messaging, and if someone else needed to be targeted, that person would be.

Why Hillary? Why is she the target, and why is she the one they’re so scared of? Part of it is misogyny. Hillary is a strong and competent and accomplished woman, and being a woman, she is more threatening even than The Black Guy who used to be president. Still, there are other women — Kamala Harris or Nancy Pelosi for example — who could be in their sights.

Hillary is powerful. She is national. Even not being an elected official, and unlikely to run for any office ever again, her voice still carries weight. Her endorsement would be gold to a Democratic candidate in a tight race. Her experience and advice would be desperately sought. For twenty years out of the last twenty-one, she’s been the most admired woman on Earth. She is loved.

And she proved Trump — and, therefore, Trumpish GOPerism — can be beaten. She won more votes in 2016 than any candidate in American history other than Barack Obama, beating Trump by nearly three million.

No other politician or public figure carries Hillary’s magic glow. Her continued upright stance in defiance of the rising tide of bigoted fascism is a poke in the eye to everything Trumpism represents.

Republicans are willing to risk looking like children frightened by shadows of the past. Hillary threatens them that much. She represents the continued strength and survival of the Democratic Party. Hillary is an image of the future, embracing diversity, tolerance, progressivism, and liberty.

There is no one else alive today — certainly not Bernie — who has this reputation, this strength, this wide-ranging experience and skill and respect. Republicans feel they must weaken Hillary’s image. They clearly don’t even care about Bernie’s.

Whether Hillary ever runs for another office or not (and I don’t believe she will), and whether she remains in the public eye or not, she will remain a force in American public life and America politics. The first woman ever to be nominated for president by a major party, and arguably one of the most qualified nominees ever, a candidate who needed Crosscheck, voter ID, Russian psyops, misogyny, Berniebots, racism, and the rise of American Nazis to keep her out of office — and even then, by a sliver of votes, in three legislative districts — yes, her very existence is a threat to Republican fascism in a way no one else ever can be.

A century from now, there will be statues of Hillary throughout America — if we can defeat Trumpism — and no one will even remember Bernie Sanders.