Quick(ish) take: Understanding the Neera Tanden fight

 Neera Tanden will not be confirmed as Biden's Director of the Office of Management and Budget.  You see, Republicans are very, very concerned about politeness and propriety, and mean tweets are disqualifying for any kind of high office.

OK, so obviously this is bullshit and hypocrisy of the highest order for people who not only have, in the past, belonged to the First Church of Trump, Non-universalist, but still have no other gods before Trump.  Yet to see much of the commentary from the predictably identitarian left over Tanden, the different treatment of Tanden is about... identity politics.  Trump, as a white male, can be as mean as he wants, but Tanden can't because "identity," that's why.

To a two-year-old with a hammer, everything is a nail, as the saying goes, and practitioners of identity politics are two-year-olds wielding hammers.  Yes, some things are nails.  We call them, "nails."  This is not a "nail."

Why are Republicans treating a liberal Democrat differently from a Republican president?  Gee... can you spot any other differences in that construction, besides demographics, which might have any significant predictive power?  Maybe a little Occam here?  Social science, like very other science, is about predictive power, and to paraphrase Pierre-Simon Laplace, I have no need of the identitarian hypothesis.

Then again, we know what the postmodernists would say about either Laplace or science, and yes, I am aware that William of Ockham was a monk.

Anyway, the opposition party will always try to claim a scalp.  The Senate is 50-50.  Tanden's tweets were the only things they could find, given Biden's nominees, so the GOP rallied around those, and if the hypocrisy is news to you, you haven't been paying attention.  Remember that fun game during Trump's term of "if Obama had done what Trump is doing?"  This is about trying to claim a scalp.  Any scalp will do.  Tanden's tweets were the only things they could find, and the hypocrisy and stupidity of the attack just mean Biden's nominees are actually, basically qualified, if lefty.  If it weren't for Tanden's tweets, the GOP would make up some pseudo-scandal about someone else.  They don't exactly have a problem with lies, in case you hadn't noticed.

If you argue that they have a problem with mean women, then why are they rallying behind Marjorie Taylor Greene?  Or, is there... maybe another variable that I already mentioned that has superior predictive power?  But there I go with my "science" again!

Manchin?  He is a Democrat from West Virginia.  In order to hold that seat, he has to go along with the GOP on a bunch of stupid, meaningless stuff, and at the end of the day, it doesn't matter to the country if Tanden, specifically, is head of OMB.  So he caves to GOP pressure on this stupid, hypocritical bullshit.

No, it isn't about her being a woman, or her race, or anything.  It is far more basic than that.  Don't be a two-year-old with a hammer.  Put down the hammer, Napoleon.