George W Bush

Despite being a socialist and, by all accounts, left-wing liberal through much of his lifetime, Christopher Hitchens had mixed views on George W. Bush, with his primary criticisms coming before Sept. 11, 2001. These criticisms were largely squared on his foreign policy, which Hitchens noted as "non-interventionist", his beliefs on capital punishment and his support of the theory of intelligent design. Hitchens had a particularly scathing quote about Bush during his time as Governor of Texas in the mid 90's, stating that "He is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated and apparently quite proud of all these things." While Hitchens did reverse course on the criticisms of Bush's foreign policy initiatives following Sept. 11, 2001, he still sought to levy many criticisms against Bush, namely the usage of waterboarding by U.S. troops at both Haditha and Abu Ghraib, as well as the domestic spying program that began under Bush's prevue. This program was started without a warrant, which caused Christopher Hitchens to join a number of other people and organizations in a lawsuit against the NSA, which went by the name ACLU v. NSA.

In the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, Hitchens lent his support to Ralph Nader, an independent, as he was enamored with neither Bush or Gore as candidates. When the 2004 election began in earnest, Hitchens stated that he was slightly for Bush as president going into his second term. However, he changed his position soon thereafter to neutral in the election between George W. Bush and John Kerry. In 2009, after Bush's two term presidency concluded, Hitchens wrote an article that served somewhat as a defense of his beliefs in why he wasn't sorry that Bush served two terms as President of the U.S. While Hitchens made it clear that his statements and writings on this matter were not necessarily intended as a defense, he stated that he's not sure that any alternative administration would have reacted in a different way given the situation that occurred on Sept. 11.