So Bernie Sanders took one look at a skinny, balding, bespectacled, pencil-necked geek whose specialty is crunching budget numbers, and instead of focusing on those skills in terms of his fitness for a job with the Office of Management and Budget, he went and decided that theological hair-splitting would be a better way to assess his fitness for office at the man's congressional confirmation hearing.

Hear that?  He wanted to test how many angels could dance on the head of a pin with this nominee, not find out whether the man could add and subtract enough numbers to get his job done.  One wonders how much dirt-digging went into coming up with Sanders's questions:

Sanders, instead, focused solely on Vought's sentence that said: "Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his son, and they stand condemned."  

"Are you suggesting," scolded Sanders, "that all of those people stand condemned? What about Jews, do they stand condemned, too?

Vought countered, "Senator I am a Christian..."

Sanders interrupted.

"I understand you are a Christian," Sanders said. "But this country is made up of people who are not just... I understand Christianity is a majority religion but there are people of other religions in this country and around the world in your judgement do you think that people who are not Christians are going to be condemned?"

Vought responded, "Thank you for probing on that point. As a Christian, I believe that all individuals are made in the image of God and are worthy of dignity and respect regardless of their religious beliefs."

Any questions as to Sanders' priorities?

Let's get into the specifics of what Bernie Sanders really wanted done. In harassing and shouting at OMB nominee Russell Vought over an orthodox Protestant post he wrote a few years ago, outlining his Protestant beliefs, Sanders sought to "expose" the man as a bible-thumping religious Christian bigot who would persecute both Muslims and Jews into oblivion. It's obviously something that looms large as a threat in his head, even in this age of Islamic terror, and he doesn't think about budgets too much..

Here is the sorry exchange:

What's disgusting about it is that it isn't even based on a counter-religious dogma.  It's based on the presumptuousness of universalist secularism, the idea that all religions are alike, all people are equally bound for heaven, and one bows down to the god of political correctness.

Sanders set up a religious litmus test for Vought in a bid to undercut President Trump.  It shows that he is willing to run roughshod over the constitutional right to not be tested by religion, all because getting Trump is something to be done "by any means necessary."

Writing as a Catholic, I don't share Vought's Protestant theology, but I defend his right to believe it, and think he does have a right to think it without fear of being shut out of geek number-crunching jobs, as should all Americans.  Muslims hold similar views on Christians, and many other religions have similar exclusivity as a tenet of faith.  Not understanding that opens the door to religious persecution, which is where Sanders seemed to be heading.

As the American Conservative notes, it's not what he believes, but how he behaves.  Sanders made no note of that because all he cares about are symbols, not records.  For the left, it's always all about the intention, not the result.