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Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace rejected the "great man" theory of history, made fashionable by Thomas Carlyle. Napoleon, Cromwell and Caesar were "history's slaves", fulfilling the will of Providence, argued [...]

On July 8, 2003, at Goree Island, Senegal, George W. Bush delivered the most important speech on American slavery since Abraham Lincoln. As an example of rhetorical artistry, the speech is a masterpiece, putting the brutality of slavery into historical, political, and theological perspective. Although the speech had deliberative effects--it grew out of, and contributed to, the Millennium Challenge as well as the administration's African AIDS initiative---it was primarily an epideictic speech that envisioned Providential history as its audience. By adopting the God of history as audience, Bush was able to confess the nation's original sin and to begin to make amends by directing billions of dollars to African development as well as treatment of AIDS and malaria. While largely successful with Africans, the speech left many African Americans both puzzled and angry. The Bush administration could have built on the initial success of the Goree Island speech by extending the internal logic of the address to the material conditions of African Americans, but it did not. Keywords: Africa; Slavery; George W. Bush; Goree Island, Providence; Sin; Justice; Irony DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2010.499107

Abstract Part II of 'Contesting the mechanisms of disinformation' inspects prevalent Western imperialistic notions regarding revolutionary Cuba, and Fidel Castro's official contestation thereof: are Cubans denied basic rights that the [...]

Elections should serve to reaffirm a citizenry's belief in the legitimacy of its political processes and outcomes. This study focuses on perceptions of vote count accuracy as a criterion variable. An argument is offered that voters' personal perceptions of post-election vote count accuracy are predicted by vote choice, with those citizens who did not vote for the winning candidate having to deal with the cognitive dissonance created by the election outcome. The model offered in this work focuses on an interaction between partisan strength and debate viewing as predictor of vote choice. In addition, an indirect effect of partisanship on vote choice through debate viewing is explored. Debate viewing is shown to promote partisan voting, and vote choice serves as a strong predictor of perceptions of vote count accuracy. A subset of the 2004 National Annenberg general election panel data (N = 5,660) was used for this secondary analysis. Keywords: U.S. presidential elections; cognitive dissonance; debate viewing; partisanship; vote accuracy

"The Kremlin's nervousness over the upcoming presidential succession, although camouflaged by oil wealth and passed over in silence by the renationalized or intimidated mass media, is plain to see."

"Chen, never having won a sweeping popular mandate, and understanding after the 2004 legislative election that he would face a hostile legislature for the rest of his time in office, has largely devoted himself to reshaping Taiwan's view of itself."

The Soviets provided Cuba with the model of attacking human rights activities and organizations as a necessary extension of the Jewish Zionist conspiracy. The identification of Castro with forces dedicated to the destruction of Israel was made plain in proclamation and practice. The Cuban position is that the war on terrorism is actually an example of "Liberation Imperialism." Cubans make no reference to the repeated assaults on Israel, or the actual causes of the Middle East conflict--the denial of the right of Israel to exist as a Nation-State in that region. Anti-Semitism is so powerfully rooted as a cultural element in authoritarian cultures that even when, as in the case of Cuban communism, it entails the tortured twisting of doctrinal elements within Marxism--Leninism, such as doctrinal claims about the "materialist foundations of society," its leaders will sacrifice the ideology to the reality. Part of the Castro attachment to communism is an overall contempt for the Jewish mini-Diaspora within the larger flight of Cubans to the United States and other places where the practice of free speech remain unimpeded. The regime of Fidel Castro has changed little in the past 49 years, compared to the rest of the world. Keywords Communism * Jihadist * Zionist * Nazism * Hostility

When journalists, commentators, and political strategists talk about elections, few terms come up more frequently than that of the swing voter, yet this concept has been almost entirely ignored by academic analysts of voting and elections. In an attempt to fill that void, this article first develops a definition of the swing voter and then offers a simple way of locating swing voters in a mass sample survey. Using data from the American National Election Studies, the article then provides an initial look at the swing voters and how they differ from the rest of the electorate. Keywords: swing voters; independent voters; electoral volatility; party identification; partisanship; split-ticket voting

The similarities between the 2000 US general elections and the 2006 Mexican elections are discussed, analyzing the impact of the Mexico election results on the US. Besides the issue of illegal Mexican immigrants in the US, the Mexican election outcome has ramifications for the economic relations between the two countries, since the elected Mexican President calls for major revisions in the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

They stole the election of 2000. They would like to steal it once more, using corruptible electronic voting machines.' Ruth Pleva is chair of the Committee to Defeat Bush in [...]