Decrypting Enigma

Although I think it's giving the man way too much credit, this article does an interesting job of comparing and contrasting the rhetorical techniques or Bush and Hilter.
Successful hypnosis of the electorate satisfies a demagogue's dream -- uncritical acceptance of the man and his policies by a majority. Bush has been good enough at it to acquire an aura of invincibility that predictably has led to an excess of hubris in his conduct.
How do such otherwise intelligent people get suckered into this way of thinking?

The Church of Bush
What liberal infidels will never understand about the president
None of the people at Kitty and Tom Harmon's bungalow are stupid. Instead they are the kind of "well-informed" that comes from overlong exposure to conservative media: conservatives who construct towers of impressive intellectual complexity on toothpick-weak foundations.
What does the conservative media have to do with this? Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda said it well:
"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitive. In the long run basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals."
Talking Points
Jon Stewart explains how keeping up with current events isn't so hard after all.
Talking points -- they’re true, because they’re said a lot.

Are we to conclude that W and/or the Bushies are masters of hypnosis? Truly they are in a league of their own, having taken their artform to a new level entirely.
"The verbal confusion technique, which is quite difficult to administer, involves an approximation of double-talk in which instructions of a somewhat contradictory kind are given in rapid succession making it impossible for the attentive subject either to quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them. Finally, he simply gives up all attempts and more or less collapses into a hypnotic state."
What do you mean by "double-talk" and "contradictory instructions"? Oh, I don't know. Things like Powell: Terrorism report was a 'big mistake',or

The Pentagon on Friday released newly discovered payroll records from President Bush's 1972 service in the Alabama National Guard. A Pentagon official said the earlier contention that the records were destroyed was an "inadvertent oversight."

Molly Ivins has this to say on the subject:
Here's the chain of logic. The CIA was wrong, therefore those on the left who say President Bush lied to us are wrong because he wasn't lying, he just believed the CIA. And you people are being rude and hateful and ugly and just mean about President Bush, and we want an apology.

What I'm worried about here is the amnesia factor. Am I the only person around who distinctly remembers an entire 18 months ago? This is what happened: The CIA was wrong, but it wasn't wrong enough for the White House, which kept pushing the spies to be much wronger. The CIA's lack of sufficient wrongness was so troubling to the anxious Iraq hawks that they kept touting their own reliable sources, such as Ahmad Chalabi and his merry crew of fabulists. The neo-cons even set up their very own little intelligence shop in the Pentagon to push us into this folly in Iraq.

Their first week in office, the Bushies claimed the Clintonites had taken the W's off White House computers, glued the drawers together and committed other vandalism -- all of which turned out to be a big fat lie. Why that didn't tip the media off about what kind of people they were dealing with is unclear to me.
When W Met Hegel
The dialectical method of reasoning bases its premises on constant conflicts of opposites, on natural, ongoing tension between two or more commonly acknowledged truths. Good versus evil is the most commonly understood dialectic.

How is it possible to consider a Hegelian argument? If the ideas are wrong, the interpretations of experiences are wrong, and the sources are all wrong, can a conclusion based on all these wrong premises be TRUE? The answer is no. Two false premises do not make a true conclusion even if the argument follows the formula. Three, four, five, or six false premises do not all combine to make a conclusion true. You must have at least one true premise to reach a true conclusion. Just because an argument fits the formula, it does not necessarily make the conclusion TRUE.

Hegel is an imperialist con artist who established the principles of dialectical "no-reason." Hegel's dialectic has allowed globalists to lead simple, capable, freeborn men and women back into the superstitious, racist and unreasonable age of imperial global dominance. Twisted logic is why cons are so successful, and Hegel twisted it in such a way as to be "impenetrable."

Hegel's brilliance rests in his ability to confuse and obfuscate the true motives of the planners, and millions of people world-wide have been trying to make sense of why it doesn't work for over 150 years. But like the AA definition of insanity, the world keeps trying it over and over expecting different results.
How can we break this hypnotic trance?
I don't know, but I think this may be useful source of therapy: Outfoxed – Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism
Greenwald and a team of researchers compiled a list of what they saw as Fox's telltale themes and techniques: stories questioning the patriotism of liberals; relentlessly upbeat reports on Iraq; belligerent hosts who scream at noncompliant guests. Greenwald planned for the list's categories eventually to become organizing sections of the film.
And, of course, Jon Stewart