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George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is the 43rd and current President of the United States, inaugurated on January 20, 2001. He was re-elected in the 2004 Presidential election and is currently serving his second term. He formerly served as the 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. more...

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A Republican, he belongs to one of the most politically influential American families, and is the son of former President George H. W. Bush and elder brother of Jeb Bush, the current Governor of Florida. Supporters and detractors alike refer to him by the nickname, Dubya, playing on a stereotyped and generalized Southern pronunciation of the letter W.

Bush was an entrepreneur in the oil industry in Texas and an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978. After working on his father's presidential campaign, he purchased a share of the Texas Rangers baseball team. In 1994 he was elected Governor of Texas where he worked on education reform, school finance reform, tort reform and sponsored the largest tax cut program in Texas history. He was re-elected as governor of Texas in 1998. Bush won the 2000 presidential election as the Republican candidate in a close and controversial contest. Although he did not secure a majority of the popular vote, he did win the required number of electoral votes after a very close battle in the state of Florida. As President, Bush pushed through a $1.3 trillion tax cut program and the No Child Left Behind Act, and has made efforts to privatize Medicare and Social Security. Bush has also pushed for socially conservative efforts such as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, faith-based welfare initiatives, the Palm Sunday Compromise and the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, which aims to amend the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman, and thus prevent recognition of same-sex marriage in the United States.

Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Bush declared a global War on Terrorism and ordered the invasion of Afghanistan which he publicly stated was in order to overthrow the Taliban, destroy Al-Qaeda and to capture Osama Bin Laden. In March 2003, Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, Bush committed the U.S. to establishing democracy in the Middle East, and specifically in both Afghanistan and Iraq in the short term. A self-described \"war President\", Bush won re-election in 2004 after an intense and heated election campaign, becoming the first candidate to win a majority vote in 16 years.

Since his re-election in 2004, Bush has received increasingly heated criticism, even from former allies, on the Iraq War, the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandals, as well as domestic issues such as federal funding of stem cell research, Hurricane Katrina, NSA warrantless surveillance controversy, record budget deficits, the rise of political corruption in the U.S., the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, and a number of scandals, such as the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal and the Plame CIA leak controversy. According to opinion polling, his popularity has declined.

Read more at Wikipedia.org