The White House's "Lying World of Consistency": Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" offers some chilling parallels between Bush's and Cheney's black-and-white world of certainty and the rise of fascism:

Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.

In Jonathan Schell's essay on the Republican convention, he extends Arendt's thinking:

Seen in Arendt's terms, the convention was proto-totalitarian--an invitation to a still-free people not just to believe a few lies but to believe in what she calls a "lying world." The attraction and power of such a bid resides in its totality, as if someone had disaggregated the dots in a photograph, discarded half, added new ones and then reassembled them all into a compelling new photograph. In Arendt's words, such an effort requires "using, and at the same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are definitely removed from all possible control by individual experience." Not just one fact or another but the factual world is discarded.

Read Schell's full essay.

(Thanks, Jim.)