A more grandiose rhetoric draws our attention, at least, to the danger of gigantic massacres.
But if Obama's rhetoric draws on the tradition of such professorial political leaders as Adlai Stevenson and Woodrow Wilson, it also strongly reflects his roots as a community organizer in Chicago who worked with African American religious leaders.
In some places politicians are combining homophobia with nationalism to create a noxious, hybrid populism portraying gay rights as a Western imposition and themselves as bulwarks against encroaching foreign depravity.In the former Soviet Union, this rhetoric draws on old, cold- war enmities; in Africa it enlists the mantras of anti-colonialism.
Ben Kingsley's nefarious Mandarin is a preposterous, shadowy Bin Laden clone with a big bushy beard and rhetoric drawn from the Acme guide to over-the-top comic book villainy, taunting Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man with lines like: "You'll never see me coming!" The problem is, he's right.
Obama's alarmist rhetoric drew criticism for its likely devastating effect on consumer and investor confidence.
Trump's xenophobic rhetoric draws on the political hysteria that followed the large influx of unaccompanied Central American children and families reaching the US border in 2014.
A good deal of the rhetoric draws on overtones from issues that, while meaningful to the American experience, are just projections by the minds of others upon the actions of the principals involved.
When it comes to the war in Iraq, the president and the leading GOP contender to replace him seem to be stuck in a time warp -- tossing out applause lines from years gone by and using rhetoric drawn from the Dark Ages of the Iraq debate.
Trump's rhetoric draws on and exacerbates the exact type of hatred--aimed at anyone who might look like a Mexican immigrant--that led a 17-year-old Patchogue high school student to plunge a knife into a man who fit that bill, and take his life.
But there were signs the Republican frontrunner's increasingly divisive rhetoric is drawing a volatile mix of opponents and supporters.
