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Comments on the foreign policy of George W. Bush in the U.S. Similarity of the Basic National Security Strategy paper issued by the Bush administration from those of its predecessors; Prevention of an action deemed harmful to U.S. policy; Imbalance between ideology and interest in the Bush White House.

In the next year, reforming the manner in which intelligence agencies conduct surveillance will be a national priority. As recent events like the Boston Marathon bombing have shown, gathering effective intelligence to prevent national security threats remains a pressing goal for policymakers. Nevertheless, the current statutory framework, an expansive amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act passed by Congress in 2008 and renewed in late 2012, has been almost universally criticized by policymakers, legal academics, and members of the general public from across the political spectrum. Congress itself was deeply unsatisfied with the Act, including within it a narrow sunset provision with the intention of substantially revising the act at the end of 2012. Despite near-consensus on the need for reform outside the National Security Administration (NSA) itself, Congress renewed the act with minimal floor debate and a nearly unanimous vote. Now, because of the myriad problems associated with intelligence surveillance (many of which were recently disclosed by Edward Snowden and The Guardian newspaper), the Obama Administration has released a plan to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance law. While President Obama's "NSA speech" offers a helpful starting point, this paper argues that further reforms will be required to end the abusive NSA practices that began under President George W. Bush and continued under the current administration. In doing so, this paper summarizes current intelligence surveillance law and proposes legislative language that Congress should adopt in implementing reforms that protect the fundamental privacy of American citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In much of the world, President George W. Bush was not admired for his foreign policy and diplomacy. It is therefore ironic that Bush's single most uncontested foreign policy triumph was an instance of what has now become known as "health diplomacy". In 2003 Bush launched the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a five-year $15 billion initiative to fight HIV/AIDS, mostly in Africa. The president's pragmatic health diplomacy may well save his foreign policy legacy. This article argues that a middle power such as South Africa should consider a similar instrumental AIDS diplomatic strategy, to rehabilitate its public health as well as foreign policy images. Discussion: This article reflects on the emergence and contemporary practice of health diplomacy. In particular, it explores the potential of niche areas within health diplomacy to become constructive focal points of emerging middle powers' foreign policies. Middle powers often apply niche diplomacy to maximise their foreign policy impact, particularly by pursuing a multilateral agenda. The literature on middle powers indicates that such foreign policy ambitions and concomitant diplomacy mostly act to affirm the global status quo. Instead, this paper argues that there may well be niches within health diplomacy in particular that can be used to actually challenge the existing global order. Emerging middle powers in particular can use niche areas within health diplomacy in a critical theoretical manner, so that foreign policy and diplomacy become a project of emancipation and transformation, rather than an affirmation of the world as it is. Summary: The article first describes the emergence and contemporary practice of health diplomacy; this is followed by a discussion of niche diplomacy, in particular as it applies to the foreign policy agendas of emerging middle powers. It then reviews South African foreign policy and diplomacy, before situating these policies within the context of emerging mechanisms of south-south multilateralism. The article concludes by synthesizing these elements and advocating for a South African AIDS diplomacy, emphasizing its potential to galvanize a global project of emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the impact of Florida's disfranchisement law on the 2000 Presidential election. The analysis simulates outcomes in Florida under scenarios consistent with the turnout rates of Georgia and North Carolina ex-felons in 2000 and Florida ex-felons in 2008. Survey evidence on candidate preferences as well as data on ex-felon party registration in Florida and North Carolina are used to produce estimates of support for Bush and Gore among ex-felons. Based on the simulations, the ex-felon population in Florida would have favored Bush in 2000. Assuming that ex-felons supported Gore at rates similar to GSS respondents with at most a high school diploma, Bush would have defeated Gore by 4,925 and 7,048 votes, assuming turnout of 10 and 15%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasive influence of partisanship on political evaluations is well known and understood. Whether citizens rely on their policy attitudes has received less attention, especially in the context of how people update and revise their evaluations. This paper focuses on presidential assessments and uses panel data covering three presidencies to model the determinants of opinion change. The results indicate that policy preferences (like partisanship) exert a regular and substantial influence on how citizens update their presidential evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is on the ways in which language develops and evolves in times of national crisis. After the events of September 11, through public rhetoric, an act of terror became a war. New York became America `s first city, while Rudolph Giuliani was named the 'mayor of the world'. Undoubtedly, the public language (re)created a national identity. President Bush used the political discourse in order to influence and convince the nation to accept a war against terrorism. His attempt was supported by the religious leaders of USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Lewis-Beck et al. (The American Voter Revisited, ) re-created The American Voter using contemporary data. Although these scholars ultimately conclude that voters today behave in ways that are consistent with the account of voting behavior presented in The American Voter, their work nonetheless highlights the importance and value of re-examining past ideas. Given that Lewis-Beck et al. have re-tested the findings of The American Voter, it is both timely and worthwhile to re-examine Fiorina's (Retrospective voting in American national elections, ) political theory of party identification, which is often seen as a critique of the theory of party identification presented in The American Voter, using newly available panel data. In this paper, I re-examine Fiorina's (Retrospective voting in American national elections, ) political theory of party identification using data from the 2000-2002-2004 NES panel study. In addition to applying Fiorina's approach to party identification to new data, as a more robust test of Fiorina's theory, I develop a model of party identification where changes in party identification are modeled as a function of the actual changes in retrospective political evaluations. Overall, my findings are broadly consistent with the findings from Fiorina's original model of party identification; however, my analysis suggests that the distribution of opinions in the electorate and elite signals may be important to changes in party identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander Hamilton's writings, virtually alone among the framers, were invoked by President George W. Bush and his legal advisors as the cornerstone of the administration's assertions of sweeping executive powers in the areas of war and peace and national security. The Bush administration's conscription of Hamilton to justify its soaring claims of presidential power, however, represents a distortion and abuse of his views of the latter president's views, particularly those expressed in The Federalist Papers. With the loss of Hamilton as an intellectual pillar, President Bush's theory of a plenary executive power finds no support among the framers. Analysis of Hamilton's writings will repair his undeserved reputation as an apologist for expansive executive powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper is presented that argues that the war on terrorism convened by U.S. President George W. Bush after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 is an immoral and failed policy. The author suggests that the resulting economic chaos is not simply a global financial crisis or a banking crisis, but a failure of the capitalist system that affects all economic sectors. He mentions the catastrophic consequences of the U.S. conduct of two wars with no tax increase.

The current Bush Administration has made dramatic changes in US domestic and international reproductive health policies. This paper discusses the issues involved in some of these changes, and it considers likely developments in this area during the remainder of George W Bush's second term. The first section of the paper defines the term reproductive health and presents a framework for classifying reproductive health policies. The second section examines changes that the Administration has made in domestic family planning policies. The third section looks at analogous changes in American assistance for reproductive health internationally. The final section considers the implications of these trends for future policy and women's health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the critical response of the Christian Right towards the Israel-Palestine conflicts by examining two events: the 2002 Road Map Peace Plan and the Annapolis Conference. It seeks to examine the critical role of the Christian Right in American foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration, with particular regard to Israel and Palestine. It argues that the Christian Right has consistently demonstrated its earnest concern about American foreign policy towards Israel, particularly the present Israel-Palestine conflict resolution. However, the paper seeks to establish that, after 9/11, the Christian Right extended its support for Israel beyond its traditional theological partiality and that such support was offered under a banner of American national security and the War on Terror. However, the study also shows how mainstream evangelicals are often divided in their opinions on the issue of the Christian Right's unequivocal support for Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons supposedly learned from and justified by the ‘new sciences’ made their way to the highest reaches of the US Department of Defense under President G.W. Bush, and served as a foundation for acting quickly and preventively against ‘gathering threats’. In addition to allowing us to understand better the origins of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, this paper improves our understanding of the relationship between the sciences and the state/military in the post-Cold War US — in particular the role of scientific metaphor in national security discourses that have focused on the challenges and opportunities of new information and communication technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With their increased emphasis on soft power, both the Bush and Obama Administrations have opened up a new front in the war of ideas regarding who will have the most influence over developing countries as the world moves through the twenty first century. Currently the political and philosophical differences between the parties of this conflict are not as starkly defined as they were in George Kennan’s historic argument for containment (i.e., there is no “Evil Empire,” and “terrorism” can be a process, act, or method, but not a state). Yet the consequences of losing this international war on poverty have been defined as no less than a tangible threat to U.S. national security interests and moral leadership. This paper narrowly focuses on one particular type of strategy in this new war—foreign aid for health—and how, by helping countries to supply and train more of their own soldiers in this type of fight (i.e., non-physician health workers and surgically trained workers) the United States can achieve the best results in terms of sustainability, cost, and regional impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no question that with Barack Obama the United States has a rock star as president who—behooving rock stars—is adored and admired the world over. His being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize nary a year after being elected president and barely ten months into his holding the office, testified to his global popularity rather than his actual accomplishments, which may well turn out to be unique and formidable. And it is equally evident that few—if any—American presidents were more reviled, disdained and distrusted all across the globe than George W. Bush, Obama's immediate predecessor. Indeed, the contrast between the hatred for the former and the admiration for the latter might lead to the impression that the negative attitudes towards America and Americans that was so prevalent during the Bush years have miraculously morphed into a lovefest towards the United States on the part of the global public. This paper—concentrating solely on the German case but representing a larger research project encompassing much of Western Europe—argues that love for Obama and disdain for America are not only perfectly compatible but that, in fact, the two are merely different empirical manifestations of a conceptually singular view of America. Far from being mutually exclusive, these two strains are highly congruent, indeed complementary and symbiotic with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work attempts to present the selected aspects of investigation whose main goal is the analysis of different ways of implementing values into a text, which in turn, are to gain political support and to gather interest from the public. Some concepts have been touched upon to account for various forms of verbal realizations from the discourse perspective (Chruszczewski 2002; Van Dijk 1997a; Puzynina 1991; Tyszka 1993; KŁoskowska 1980; Graber 1993; Grabias 2001). In addition to the above, this paper highlights basic American values, which are essential components of the American society. It is to be observed that the aforementioned values are commonly used by politicians delivering public speeches to unite the nation, which in case of American society, is characterized by multiplicity of ethical groups. The analysis tries to shed a little light on the choice of linguistic means included in President George W. Bush?s speeches to the nation able to unite Americans and make them work towards the common goal, namely the struggle against global terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the operation of the presidential advisory system during the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina crises in order to explain the marked differences in presidential crisis leadership performance during the acute phase of both crises. It first presents a conceptual framework for the systematic study of “crisis advisory configurations” around presidents, based on an integrated review of the advisory systems and crisis management literatures. Second, the framework is applied to George W. Bush's performance in three crucial crisis leadership task domains—sense making, decision making, and meaning making. The article concludes by identifying key challenges of building crisis management capacity around heads of government such as the U.S. president. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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President George Bush presented one of his major post-9/11 foreign- aid initiatives--the Millennium Challenge Account--as a tool for counteracting global poverty and international terrorism. The policy is based on the view that poverty and terrorism are linked, and therefore alleviating poverty will help combat terrorism. The design and the implementation of the program, however, suggest that the U.S. government may have other intentions for the MCA, including overhauling the foreign-aid regime. This paper discusses the MCA's effectiveness in addressing poverty and terrorism by highlighting the relationships between them. It discusses the other roles of the MCA and explores the implications of the policy for alleviating poverty in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on several military strategies implemented in the war against terrorism by the U.S. presidents. The Franklin A. Roosevelt administration prioritized the defeat of Germany and the George W. Bush administration prioritized the war against al-Qaeda. Roosevelt mobilized the public and the economy to fight in the World War II while Bush cut taxes and encouraged the citizens to shop to rise the economy and sacrificed the armed forces. Joseph Stalin, Josip Broz Tito, Ching Kai Shek and the Vichy governments are the alliances of Roosevelt while Bush is supported by Great Britain only. The paper elaborates the conditions of the existence of the al-Qaeda including the extremist ideology, inflammataory civil and international wars and the anger towards the Bush administration.

According to many theoretical accounts of the vote choice, distal determinants (e.g., party identification) influence proximal determinants (e.g., perceptions of candidates), which in turn shape candidate preferences. Yet almost no research on voting has formally tested such mediational hypotheses. Using national survey data collected between February and September of 2004, this paper begins by illustrating how to conduct such investigations. We explored whether public approval of President Bush’s handling of a series of specific national problems (e.g., the Iraq war) influenced overall assessments of his job performance and evaluations of his likely future performance versus John Kerry’s, which in turn shaped vote choices. The results are consistent with the claim of mediation and shed additional light on the impact of various issues on the 2004 election outcome. We also tested what we term the “dosage hypothesis,” derived from news media priming theory, which posits that changes in the amount of media coverage of an issue during the course of a campaign should precipitate changes in the weight citizens place on that issue when evaluating the president’s overall job performance, particularly among citizens most exposed to the news. Surprisingly, this analysis did not yield consistent support for the venerable dosage hypothesis, suggesting that the conditions under which priming occurs should be specified much more precisely in future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that U.S. funding for fiscal year 2008 for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) was reduced. The Health and Human Services part of the $555 billion domestic spending package signed by U.S. President George W. Bush, failed to keep pace with the rate of inflation for the fifth consecutive year in the field of biomedical research. The SAMHSA-funded program, the Mental Health Block Grant which provides services to children and adults with severe mental disabilities, was cut by $7 million. A provision included in the bill changed the language of the policy of submitting papers to PubMed Central for research that was funded by the NIH.

In this paper, the authors use the Bush administration’s management grades from the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) to evaluate performance budgeting in the federal government—in particular, the role of merit and political considerations in formulating recommendations for 234 programs in the president’s fiscal year 2004 budget. PART scores and political support were found to influence budget choices in expected ways, and the impact of management scores on budget decisions diminished as the political component was taken into account. The Bush administration’s management scores were positively correlated with proposed budgets for programs housed in traditionally Democratic departments but not in other departments. The federal government’s most ambitious effort to use performance budgeting to date shows both the promise and the problems of this endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of controversies arising in the 2000 presidential elections in the U.S. The first controversy was about the accusations that media networks called, or projected, a winner faster in those states won by Albert Gore than in those states won by George W. Bush. This accusation was investigated by estimating a Tobit model of the length of time between states' poll closing times and times at which television broadcaster CNN had projected a winner. Results support the charge of media bias. After controlling for other factors that affect how quickly a state is called, states called for Gore were called 14 to 18 minutes faster than those called in favor of Bush.