Still working to recover. Please don't edit quite yet.
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) was the 43rd president of the United States. Bush, a Republican, was elected 46th governor of Texas in 1994 and was re-elected in 1998. From there, he moved on to win the nomination of the Republican Party for the 2000 presidential race and ultimately defeated Democratic Vice President Al Gore. In 2004, Bush was elected to a second term, defeating Democratic Senator John Kerry. This term expired January 20, 2009.
Appointments[edit]
If it were not already abundantly clear that the race or sexual orientation of a candidate should be of no concern next to their political agenda and integrity, then there is a lesson to be learned by Bush's record of appointments.
In his first term, Bush appointed Colin Powell as Secretary of State, who became the first African-American man to serve in that position, and the man who directly lied with the 'sixteen words' that alleged Nigerian yellowcake uranium had been transported to Iraq, and carried out various other charades designed to defraud the legislature and the electorate. He was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice in 2005, who became the first African-American woman to hold the post, whose lies convinced those in the CIA who were skeptical about the Bush team's allegations of nuclear enrichment centrifuges and rocket parts. In 2005, he appointed Alberto Gonzalez as the United States Attorney General, the first Hispanic to hold that position, who called the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners 'quaint', and lied more than both of the others to escape the charges of intimidation of judges by the Justice Department. In total, Bush has appointed more women and minorities to high-level positions within his administration than any other U.S. President.
Bush is the first Republican president to have appointed an openly gay man to serve in his administration (Scott Evertz as director of the Office of National AIDS Policy), and the first president to see one such appointment, that of openly gay Ambassador to Romania Michael E. Guest, receive Congressional confirmation. Once, during his 2000 campaign trail, he met with the Log Cabin Republicans, a first for a Presidential candidate.
