Just days after she compared her Republican rivals to terrorists and Nazis, Hillary Clinton told a Hamptons fundraiser crowd that campaigns should not be about “insults.”
“I don’t believe that elections that are going to result in leadership decisions should be about personalities, should be about insults, should be about rhetoric, should be about a lot of what we see going on in this campaign,” Hillary told a crowd full of children Sunday morning.
The pancake breakfast fundraiser in the Hamptons was one of three Hillary attended that day. Video of the event was live streamed by radio host Samantha Ettus. A portion of Clinton’s speech was also uploaded to YouTube (see below).
Clinton’s rejection of insults and rhetoric comes just three days after she compared GOP candidates to terrorists. At a speech in Cleveland on Thursday Clinton said, “extreme views about women, we expect that from some of the terrorist groups, we expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world, but it’s a little hard to take from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States.”
The very next day, Clinton discussed the GOP candidates’ views on immigration in terms reminiscent of the Holocaust. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee event in Minneapolis Clinton said, “I find it the height of irony that a party which espouses small government would want to unleash a massive law enforcement effort– including perhaps National Guard and others–to go and literally pull people out of their homes and their workplaces, round them up, put them, I don’t know, in buses… boxcars, in order to take them across our border.”
A Clinton spokesman denied Saturday that the reference to putting people in “boxcars” was a Holocaust reference. However, blogger Jeryl Bier has identified two previous instances in which Clinton described rounding people up and putting them in “boxcars.” Both instances were events dedicated to remembering the Holocaust.
Clinton gave a State Department Holocaust commemoration speech in 2012 in which she described the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg to save Jews from the Nazis during World War II. “He leapt onto deportation trains and, like a hand reaching into the grave, pulled people out of the boxcars, carrying them to safety,” Hillary said.
In 2010, Secretary Clinton spoke at the Oscar Schindler factory museum in Poland, saying, “We see here the two realities of the Holocaust. One involves the cold, mechanized slaughter of millions of men, and women, and children, many of them wrenched from their communities, herded into boxcars by their neighbors and sent to die.”