Sarah Hromack

Fun with Semantics! Kriston Capps writes for Huffpo on Bush’s presidential portrait. The National Portrait Gallery recently caught some flak from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) over the painting’s accompanying “tombstone text.” Sanders took umbrage with one specific phrase: “the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Quoth the Senator: “When President Bush and Vice President Cheney misled our country into the war in Iraq, they certainly cited the attacks on September 11, along with the equally specious claim that Iraq possessed vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The notion, however, that 9/11 and Iraq were linked, or that one “led to” the other, has been widely and authoritatively debunked.”
The (edited) text:

George W. Bush born 1946 Forty-third president, 2001–

“The biggest advantage and the biggest handicap I have,” George W. Bush frankly admitted, “is my name.” The grandson of a United States senator and the eldest son of a president, Bush was a popular governor of Texas who worked successfully with both Republicans and Democrats. In 2000, in an election so close that it required the intervention of the Supreme Court, Bush defeated Al Gore, the vice president during the previous administration. Expecting that the success of his presidency would hinge, as it had when he was governor, on his negotiating skills and ability to solve problems, Bush found his two terms in office instead marked by a series of cataclysmic events: the attacks on September 11, 2001; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina; and a financial crisis during his last months in office. The White House selected Robert Anderson, a Connecticut portraitist and a Yale classmate of the president, to create this painting for the National Portrait Gallery.

Robert Anderson (born 1946) Oil on canvas, 2008