On the anti-Hillary thing.
First, there's a long-running pattern here. Right wing media operate to further GOP electoral goals, validate conservative orthodoxy and to push their audience further to the right. A key means of achieving these ends is (and has been since the rise of talk radio and publishing enterprises like Regnery) a constant stream of stories/viewpoints which have the goal of demonizing key Dem figures. Truth and accuracy play little part in these operations. Limbaugh and Coulter are absolutely typical examples. It is a propaganda enterprise highly incentivized by the huge profits that accrue. As I've noted before, Limbaugh makes about 70 million a year. Beck outpaced that by 10 million a few years back. Hannity pulls in around 40 million a year. Coulter is a multi-millionaire. Regnery was making so much money that Simon and Schuster started up their own conservative imprint (Threshold Editions) and put Mary Matalin in charge. Etc, etc. Fox is Murdoch's most profitable single enterprise.
One characteristic of the output from these people and their product is isolation of key Dem individuals followed by an apparently unending avalanche of attack stories on the individual. Unending? They are still going after Jimmy Carter 37 years after he was out of office. Consider the campaigns against Al Gore (still going on) and John Kerry (nothing good about him anywhere in RW media). Nancy Pelosi. Harry Reid. Anybody who rises up in the Dem firmament will get the same treatment.
They act in this way in part because of the money to be made but also because it is politically effective. The stories/viewpoints are exceedingly simple-minded and with almost no nuance whatsoever. Nuance and second-guessing are wishy-washy and something only spineless RINOs fall to. Orthodoxy is hammered in and woe to any Republican who is not on board.
For a solid study on all this, you might want to order up the book here
Hillary provided something of a perfect target in the modern era. Not only had there been decades of typical rightwing media focus on Bill and on her (cocaine deals, financial criminality, murders, sex, lesbianism) which had primed the rightwing audience for what was to come, the very real threat of her (a Clinton and a female) winning the election (acknowledged by the smarter GOP strategists) served to unleash a smear campaign with few precedents I know of. And then, for their own purposes, the Russians climbed on board.
Writers in the press and people on boards like this wonder why Trump and rightwing media
still focus constant attacks on Hillary. That's not a tough one. It is all about simplicity (in the negative sense of simple-mindedness) and the continual stoking of prior passions and cultivated hatreds. The Hillary-she-devil story is very easy for the rightwing audience. They don't have to think about it.
And of course, pointing to the Devil in our midst is a very effective way for authoritarians to push potentially critical attention away from themselves.
