The Daily Populous Friday January 24th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by esquire.com and submitted by Esquire

Ah, well a-day! what evil looks

Instead of the cross, the albatross

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

I commend to your attention the recent confirmation hearings of Russell Vought, the career apparatchik and key figure behind Project 2025, a veritable Vesuvius of bad and dangerous ideas whom the president seeks to place in charge of the federal budget. (Remember when the president didn’t have any idea what Project 2025 was? That was cool.) Democratic senators had a high old time making Vought eat his previous words tartare.

This guy is obviously a Christian nationalist meathead. But the larger point is one that already has been made by the likes of Josh Marshall and by Jason Linkins in The New Republic. Right up to the president, make them all own what they say and what they do. Hang every anti-democratic piece of policy lunacy around the necks of every Republican officeholder like the stinking carcass of a dead seabird. Do it constantly, in every floor speech and across all platforms. And if you can’t do it, if you’re still deep in the narcotic dream of bipartisanship, lost civility, and destroyed “norms,” get the hell out of the way and let people who see clearly take on the job. Linkins made the essential point: Shove the presidency—the actual job of being president, and not the performance piece he’s made of it—down his throat, day after day. Do this because history says he’ll choke on it.

Make him do the job, because he can’t. Make him bungle, because he will. Hammer it, day after day. Russell Vought is only one of a rookery of albatrosses to hang around his neck. Accept the fact that all of them have the jobs that they have; watch them fail, because they will; and hold them to the same standards to which we hold every working person in the country.

StoppableHulk on January 23rd, 2025 at 21:16 UTC »

I don't know, media.

CAN WE?

Because I never fucking pretended to begin with.

Str8UpJorking on January 23rd, 2025 at 21:03 UTC »

Doesn’t matter. He could come out right now and say that he lied about having never heard of it.

That certain group of people - who defended his lie during the election - would come up with something to defend him.

They never admit wrongdoing. All they do is claim that they’re always right and everyone who doesn’t side with them is always wrong.

Paper_Brain on January 23rd, 2025 at 20:52 UTC »

He was open about his involvement with the project until the project started getting negative press. Only morons believed his denial