Ghoul is a term that has came into
popular parlance in the two thousand teens among leftists to describe career republican politicians who have been behind terrible policy decisions. Ghoul often refers not to charismatic figureheads like Ronald Reagan or George W
Bush but the even more powerful and decrepit looking old white men who advise them and make big decisions from the shadows. These men (because they are almost always men) put up a guise of being boring bureaucrats while in actuality they are the architects of some of the most disastrous events of the 20th century, the most notable being the Iraq War. Some example of infamous ghouls are
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter
Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Bolton. Ghouls can also be applied to congressman who despite being universally despised by many still manage to cling to power by being the right mixture of conniving and boring, like Mitch McConnell. The 2018 movie Vice, about
de-facto president
Dick Cheney, served as a spotlight to the general public on the life of Ghouls.