Richard Cheney (Pretzel of Doom)

Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney (born January 30, 1941) was the 44th President of the United States of America from 2002-2005, assuming office on January 13, 2002 following the untimely death of President George W. Bush. Prior to that, Cheney was the 46th Vice President of the United States, and had served in other capacities such as the CEO of Halliburton, as George H. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense from 1989-1993, as the House Minority Whip briefly in 1989, and as the Chief of Staff to Gerald R. Ford.

Cheney became a highly controversial President and was a lightning rod for his conduct in the War on Terror, including his invasion of Iraq in November of 2002, where no weapons of mass destruction, as he had claimed existed, could be found. In 2004, as Cheney was campaigning for reelection, a scandal ballooned featuring an attempted cover-up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse controversy as well as the serious allegations of an attempted cover-up by the CIA and White House itself in the Plame affair. Cheney was abandoned by many members of his own party in response to the "Nixonian-level scandals," as ABC's Charles Gibson called them, and lost a resounding electoral and popular defeat in 2004 to Democrat Howard Dean.