Rhetoric

HARRY A. BLACKMUN, who died yesterday at age 90, wanted to be remembered as a hard-working Supreme Court justice who applied the law fairly and contributed much during his 24-year tenure. He knew, though, that he would always be linked to his 1973 opinion upholding a woman's right to an abortion."A right of personal privacy is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy," Justice Blackmun wrote for the court's majority that year in the celebrated Roe vs. Wade case.

IT'S HARD to know who are the worse hypocrites these days. Is it the Democrats, who pretend to want to limit campaign contributions while their party does everything it can to skirt current laws? Or the Republicans, who won't admit to the American public what they know to be true -- that limits never work because clever people will always find ways around them?Last week, for example, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee has engaged in an unprecedented effort to swap funds with its state affiliates to avoid federal spending limits.

The new era of military conflict has less to do with war than with a barroom brawl on some stranger's turf. Somalia. Iraq. Bosnia. Haiti.Instead of cat-and-mousing Soviet submarines in an elite game of global chess, today's Navy is more likely to butt heads with scrappy guerrillas such as the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who wear cyanide capsules like amulets around their necks, to be used if captured.The Pentagon has coined euphemisms for the head-butting: "low-intensity conflict" and "operations other than war."

Dru Schmidt-Perkins, regional director of Clean Water Action, was misquoted in an article yesterday about Maryland's vehicle emissions inspection program. She said the governor was able to rise above the rhetoric of a "vocal minority."The Sun regrets the errors.Pub Date: 5/21/97

WASHINGTON -- At one level, it's hard to argue with the politics of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's attack on President Clinton's judicial appointments and on the American Bar Association. Lawyers, after all, are even less popular than politicians or reporters.But it is equally hard to understand the emphasis the Republican nominee-presumptive is placing on ideology. Most voters may not like ''liberalism,'' but there is no evidence that these labels have much to do with how they decide on a presidential candidate.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton ended the old year without a federal budget in hand, but he is still humming an upbeat riff as he swings into 1996, a year shaping up as a national referendum on his presidency -- and him personally.If public opinion polls are to be believed, the man who once dubbed himself "The Comeback Kid" rebounded from a disastrous 1994 to have a reasonably successful 1995. His approval rating, once as low as 40 percent, ranged into the high 50s.Fueling this surge were Mr. Clinton's rhetoric -- Republicans call it demagogy -- in defense of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid targeted by Republican budget cutters.

AS A 15-YEAR resident of this relaxed and affectionate old city, I am continually bemused by the thriving cultism inspired by H.L. Mencken in Baltimore. In this 40th anniversary year of his death, a standing-room-only throng gathered last Saturday at a local book emporium for yet another veneration of the Sage of Baltimore.Sagacious or not, Mencken was a resolute practitioner and defender of heresy, so I trust that he would salute my blasphemy in assaulting -- well, the Sage himself.First a concession: Mencken's ''The American Language'' merits due recognition as a magisterial work of scholarship.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS letter is to register my disagreement with your Jan. 28 editorial, "Stadium myths in Annapolis." The only thing right about your piece is the thesis sentence about "inflated rhetoric," and you presented the wrong side. The inflated rhetoric has been, in fact, Parris Glendening's pontifications regarding both stadiums.The original 1987 legislative approval of a downtown stadium was primarily a knee-jerk reaction to the loss of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis. It was not well thought out at that time and only agreed to by a Democratic legislature as a result of the strong personality of Gov. William Donald Schaefer, who at that time had the support of most in the Baltimore metropolitan area.

ANDREAS PAPANDREOU, who died Sunday at 77, was a Greek who became a proud American and then used anti-Americanism to become a symbol of Greek nationalism. He was a scholar who appealed to vulgar emotion, a man of the left who built no real institution but personal rule, who soared on demagogic rhetoric but acted cautiously.As a young man in the time of the fascists and as his politician-father's chief adviser in the time of the colonels, Mr. Papandreou was jailed and tortured for his beliefs.

WASHINGTON -- Thermidor, the name of the month in the French Revolutionary Calendar in which Robespierre fell and the Reign of Terror ended, has become the name by which historians denote an era of waning revolutionary ardor.Conservative critics of the 104th Congress complain that it went directly from the ancien regime to Thermidor, without any intervening revolution.The deflation of their aspirations is symbolized by Newt Gingrich brandishing buckets in which ice had been delivered to congressional offices since before the invention of refrigeration.

I hope this column makes you sick. See, we'll be talking about Nazis, something many of us are doing lately. Indeed, just this week a fellow named Joseph e-mailed me about a caller he heard on a radio show. The man, vexed over health-care reform, likened President Obama to Adolf Hitler. Asked why, he said, "Hitler took over the car companies, then health care and then he killed the Jews." Said Joseph: "I almost swerved my vehicle off the road when I heard that." But the caller is hardly unique.

FRIDAY "UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN": Diane Lane and Sandra Oh frolic in Tuscany as they overcome life's hardships and celebrate its rewards. This movie did for olive oil what "9 1/2 Weeks" did for everything else in the kitchen, except in a cleaner way. "Under the Tuscan Sun" screens at this week's Little Italy Open Air Film Festival, High and Stiles streets. The film starts at 9 p.m. Admission is free. Go to littleitalymd.com. BETTER THAN EZRA: The three-piece alternative rock band from New Orleans, which debuted in 1986 with "Deluxe" and released "Paper Empire" this year, comes to the Power Plant Live plaza, 24 Market Place, for a free show at 8 p.m. Gates open at 6 p.m. The show is for those ages 21 and older only.

In the wake of the killing of three police officers in Pittsburgh, we've learned that Richard Poplawski, the killer, was something of a conspiracy nut. He embraced dark, radical rhetoric about America and was convinced the government, at President Barack Obama's command, was going to take away his guns. In the month before his killing spree, Mr. Poplawski reportedly posted a link on a white nationalist Web site to a video of Fox News' doomsday host Glenn Beck as he referenced a conspiracy theory about how the federal government, under the auspices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was building concentration camps in order to institute totalitarian rule.

Franchot is right to reject slots It is ridiculous for Gov. Martin O'Malley to say that Comptroller Peter Franchot's stance on slots is hypocritical ("Rhetoric heating in slots battle," April 17). It's true that as a state delegate, Mr. Franchot did support slots. But then he studied the issue. That's when he discovered that the gambling industry and slots proponents were not being truthful about the revenue and job figures. He learned that the social costs from slot machine gambling would outweigh the revenues they would generate and that the sheer number of Marylanders who would be devastated by slots just wasn't worth the price.

WASHINGTON -- As Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton accused Sen. Barack Obama of using rhetoric that lacks specifics or fails to yield results, Obama countered yesterday by offering a detailed plan to spend $210 billion to create jobs in construction and environmentally friendly fields. Obama's sweep of Tuesday's primaries in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, which pushed him into the lead in the count for Democratic delegates, left him very much the target of his main Democratic and Republican rivals.

MOSCOW -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice persuaded Russian President Vladimir V. Putin yesterday to tone down the harsh words he has directed at the United States in recent months, but their talks failed to yield any breakthroughs on independence for Kosovo or on U.S. plans for a missile shield in Europe. Putin, a longtime critic of the Iraq war, surprised the Bush administration in February when, during a speech he gave in Munich, Germany, he branded U.S. foreign policy "extremely dangerous" and denounced "unilateral" U.S. military actions that "bring us to the abyss of one conflict after another."

Partisan Democrats blame America first The Sun's editorial "'Back on alert" (Aug. 11) betrays the ever-apparent Democratic Party blinders of The Sun. But what The Sun describes as the "passion and purple purpose" of the president's rhetoric, whose tone the editors called "all wrong," sounded to me like the same steadfast purpose and determination he has demonstrated since Sept. 11, 2001 - exactly what this nation needs from its leader in a time of war. And The Sun's editorial conveniently overlooked the duck-and-weave rhetoric we have heard from the opposition party, the would-be leaders of Congress who have their fingers ever testing the winds of polls and focus groups.

WASHINGTON -- Cindy Sheehan looks tired as she sits down to lead a handful of demonstrators outside the Iraqi Embassy on a recent afternoon. It has been a long year for the anti-war activist, who just completed a series of speaking engagements across Italy. Then the shouts of "U.S. out of Iraq!" begin, and her face brightens and swells with pride, like a mother who has given birth to a political movement. As Sheehan prepares to return to Crawford, Texas, today, renewing a round of protests that thrust her into the national spotlight a year ago, the story of her rise to prominence is peppered with joy and pain.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has an opportunity to demonstrate that he's serious about opposing a liquefied natural gas terminal and processing facility in eastern Baltimore County. It merely requires the governor to block the use of state-owned Hart-Miller Island to accommodate a major dredging of the waters near Sparrows Point, where the proposed $400 million LNG plant would be located. It's up to the federal government to determine whether Sparrows Point is an appropriate place for the LNG terminal proposed by AES Corp.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, after years of celebrating successes in the Iraq war only to see them give way to more violence, is toning down his rhetoric in what strategists see as a bid to calibrate public expectations of progress there. Bush said yesterday that he would do "what it takes" to help the new Iraqi government succeed and announced that he was sending senior members of his administration to Baghdad to assist their Iraqi counterparts. "I sense something different happening in Iraq," the president said, hours after returning from a surprise, whirlwind visit to Iraq's capital.