President George W. Bush
President George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is the 43rd and current president of the United States, inaugurated on January 20, 2001 and re-inaugurated on January 20, 2005.
Bush was first elected in 2000 in one of the most controversial presidential elections, after a month of ballot recounts and court challenges in Florida were ended by a Supreme Court ruling. Eight months into Bush’s presidency in 2001, nineteen hijackers sponsored by al-Qaeda carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks. President Bush responded by declaring a Global War on Terrorism, which would become a central issue of his presidency. In early October 2001, he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and attempt to destroy al-Qaeda. In March 2003, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, asserting that Iraq was in violation of UN Resolution 1441 regarding weapons of mass destruction. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq regime, Bush stated his policy of attempting to establish democracy in the Middle East, starting with Afghanistan and Iraq.
Running as a self-described “war president” in the midst of the Iraq war, Bush won re-election in 2004 after a heated general election campaign against Senator John Kerry in which President Bush’s prosecution of the Global War on Terrorism and the Iraq war became central issues. President Bush’s declaration of the Global War on Terror would become the most controversial aspect of his presidency, including issues surrounding the Iraq War, the Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandals, and related domestic controversies such as NSA warrantless surveillance activities and the Plame affair.
Following his re-election, Bush received heated condemnation, even from former allies, on these issues, as well as domestic issues such as his first-ever use of the veto power to veto federal funding of stem cell research, and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. According to polls of job approval rating, his popularity reached record heights after September 11, but later drastically declined, due to his perceived poor handling of the Iraq War. It was one of the major reasons for what Bush called the “thumpin’” of the Republican Party in November 2006 mid-term elections.
Information Courtesy of Wikipedia
