Their language was full of apocalyptic rhetoric and military analogies.

McGuinness's candidacy is proving popular, especially among Ireland's poor, and has his rivals' supporters reaching for apocalyptic rhetoric.

Mr. Bush abandoned Ronald Reagan's apocalyptic rhetoric and cowboy interventionism in favor of constructive inter-American diplomacy.

But fresh doses of apocalyptic rhetoric will do nothing to ease the P.L.O.'s problems.

That is a diatribe in which Podhoretz wraps himself in the apocalyptic rhetoric of the prophets and condemns as unholy everything from dovishness in foreign policy to multiculturalism to homosexuality.

Ben Lieberman, a senior policy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said: "There are legitimate environmental concerns, but the public doesn't buy the gloom-and-doom apocalyptic rhetoric from the Democrats.

Despite the apocalyptic rhetoric you sometimes hear, affordable injections of money would allow the system to run untroubled for at least 50 more years.

"I'm not sure which is more frightening," he said, "the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."

These days, the apocalyptic rhetoric of the lone gun nut has become the staple political analysis on Fox News (for example, try to watch this recent performance by Glenn Beck, which displays every pathology from Hofstadter's essay).

Then there is Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an Islamist demagogue whose nuclear ambitions and apocalyptic rhetoric have traumatized the West and given newfound power to his lay office.