America’s right still hates Hillary Clinton. And it still can’t stop her

 Atlanta, Georgia

Who thinks Hillary Clinton is the nastiest woman in the world? The American Spectator once called her ‘the Lady Macbeth of Arkansas’ while US News and World Report described her as ‘the overbearing yuppie wife from hell’. But that was back in the nineties. Surely such vitriol is a thing of the past? No. The founders of ‘StopHillaryPAC’ say on their website that they want to ‘save America from the destructive far-left liberal cancer’ that Mrs Clinton represents. Do they wish her actual harm? Well, they plan to ‘STOP Hillary dead in her tracks’ but, you know… just politically.

They’re not the only ones. The similarly named group ‘StopHillary2016’ is equally keen to deal out at least a metaphorical death, as is the Republican dirt-grubbing group AmericaRisingPAC. Republican National Committee leader Reince Priebus said on a radio show last year that AmericaRising was searching the record as far back as it could: ‘I think that there’s a lot of rough stuff coming out on Hillary that . . . you know, it doesn’t just come out of thin air. It comes from somewhere. And sometimes, it comes from us.’ When the networks CNN and NBC considered making documentaries about Mrs Clinton’s extraordinary career, Priebus blustered that these would be, in effect, campaign commercials for the next Democratic candidate. He then orchestrated passage of a Republican resolution to boycott the networks as carriers of the 2016 pre-election debates if they went ahead with the documentaries (they didn’t). How don’t Republicans love Hillary? Let me count the ways. She has a long record of being pro-choice on the abortion question and of favouring gay marriage. She favours a comprehensive national healthcare system, much stricter gun control, effective trade unions, an amnesty for long-term illegal immigrants, and deficit spending in recessions by a strong federal government.