The Grinch Takes A Powder

by Jack Cashill

A week or so ago I was taking a walk through Blue-ville, the pleasant
little neighborhood west of UMKC where I live, when I espied from a distance two of my truest and Bluest friends.

They had grins on their faces and a spring in their step. If these folks were smiling I knew that every Blue down in Blue-ville had to be smiling, and I knew why: the Grinch had finally taken a powder—and not a moment too soon.

It had been six long years. I remember well the night of the Grinch’s descent. An unholy ruckus roused me from my slumber. Looking out my window, I saw two of my Bluer neighbors standing in front of their house shrieking and wailing. I don’t mean this metaphorically. Metaphors don’t wake people up.

“Good news,” I guessed as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and flicked on the TV. I was right. The Supreme Court had finally put an end to the nonsense in Florida and called the election for the guy with the most votes.

Always the opportunist, the Grinch got a wonderful, awful idea. He swooped down into Blue-ville and started whispering unsweetened nothings into the ears of the disheartened Blues, “You wuz robbed.” No matter how many times the votes were counted—and the results were always the same—the Grinch was there to reassure the Blues that they had been bamboozled anew.

9-11 spooked the Grinch, and for a month or two he disappeared. But soon enough, the Grinchster was back to his old tricks. The harmony vanished, and the world of difference returned. Now, however, the disharmony was not just un-neighborly. It was downright unsafe. The country was at war.

This was all grist for the Grinch’s mischief mill. He slithered his way under Blueville’s defenses and slunk deeper still into its collective psyche, “You’ve been buffaloed,” he reassured the Blues. “You’ve been betrayed.”

Soon enough, Blue-ville began to revel in its own status as bunco victim, glory in it even. Never has a
people this bright taken such a perverse pride in their penchant for being duped. Everything was a trick, a scam, a lie. The Blues began to believe that it wasn’t their war, wasn’t their country really—in the Bluest Blue-villes, you could count the American flags on a finger—and it sure as hell wasn’t their president.

To be sure, not everyone in Blue-ville was Blue. Normally tolerant of minorities—and a bit too proud of their tolerance—now the Blues began to cold shoulder the non-Blues in their midst, me included. The invites shriveled. The insults mounted.

“You still one of the 32 percent?” a neighbor scowled at me in passing one day without so much a how-dee-do.

“You know, Truman left office with a 23 percent approval rating,” I answered, catching his drift, “and we built him a museum and named the ballparks after him. A college too!”

“Yea, maybe,” sneered my neighbor, “but your president’s stupid.”

I didn’t see much of an opening there. The Grinch had sour-talked the Blues into a pristine state of pique. They would hear nothing that chipped away at its paranoid perfection.

One day, I was out hawking my book on cultural and intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, on the Blue-ville radio station, KCUR. Before the show, I wrote down the first question I would be asked by the call-in audience.

“I am surprised,” said the caller in a snit, “that you didn’t mention one of the best known hoodwinkers, FOX NEWS. They helped your president trick the nation into thinking that Saddam had WMDs.” I had to smile. This is what I had written down.

“Speaking of hoodwinkers,” I countered, “have you read Richard Butler’s The Greatest Threat?” He had not. Head honcho of the UN’s weapons search effort, the Aussie Butler knew more about Saddam’s WMDs than Saddam. A leftist and literal Blue Helmet, Butler had little reason to put one over on Blue-ville. Yet after
being booted from Iraq, all he could say of Saddam’s no-WMD plea was that it was “the blackest lie.”

“Has Richard Butler hoodwinked the nation?” I asked.
Of course not. Every serious intelligence agency in the world felt the same. But so keen was Blue-ville on feeling conned that its media have refused to even look for the missing WMDs. (I will be happy to point them in the right direction.)

As to why “Bush lied, and people died,” the Grinch customized answers to fit just about everyone’s particular pout: oil, Halliburton, re-election, avenging daddy, and that old standby, the Jews.

And that is not the only “lie” in which Blue-ville wallowed. One great Grinchy trick has been to convince Blue-ville that before the “invasion” Iraq was a kite-flying Eden about as menacing as Iowa. Old Uncle Saddam would have nothing to do with Old Uncle Osama. Or was it Osama who would have nothing to do with Saddam? Whatever.

True, Blue-ville didn’t always see the Osama-Saddam thing as a flim-flam. In 1998, President Clinton warned of “the very kind of threat Iraq poses now—a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists.” Six days later, Osama bin Laden signaled that he just might have been the terrorist Clinton had in mind. He issued a fatwah “to kill all Americans” based in no small part on America’s “continuing aggression against the Iraqi people.”

In the spring of 1998 the Clinton Justice indicted Osama, claiming “that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work coop-eratively with the government of Iraq.” Always obliging, the Grinch has helped Blue-ville media flush this info down what George Orwell aptly called “the memory hole.” But that was then. This is now. The Blues are smiling again. When I talked to my happy Blue friends a week or so ago, they waited until the second sentence to rag me about the recent elections.

“There’s a silver lining,” I told them. “What?” they asked incred-ulously. “You’re engaged again.” I said. “I hate to admit it, but we need you. We can’t win this war with our left hand tied behind our back.”

Although America has avoided a terrorist attack anywhere in the world beyond Iraq and Afghanistan these past five years—and supreme Christ-mas thanks to those who have suffered or died that this should be so—the war against radical Islam is no more “fictitious” than Michael Moore’s gut. And it is not going away in the near future.

When we abandoned Vietnam, the little Hos didn’t follow us home. The little Osamas will. As I told my friends, I was glad to have them back in the game. I was being serious, and they could see it. They listened. The Grinch was not pleased.

Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.