Two Things I Should Work Up Outrage About

1) The conservatives claiming that there is a "pogrom" going on against conservative thinkers.

2) The Department of Defense claiming that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have approved of Bush's two wars.

#2 is easy to dispose of. All you need to do is read Dr King's 1967 speech at the Riverside Church. In a time when social programs have been gutted and there is one political party whose naked agenda is to eliminate the social safety net (and to bring back child labor), it is hard for anyone with any sense whatsoever to imagine that Dr. King would have approved of spending trillions of dollars on those wars.

#1 is personal to me. A "pogrom," in my family history, was when the local Christian peasants and/or the Cossacks got liquored up and went on a rampage through the shtetls in the Pale, raping Jewish women and girls, beating and killing Jewish men and boys, and sometimes burning down the villages. Those pogroms, large and small, were winked at or even sanctioned by the local priests and the governments. It was by no means limited to the Pale of the Russia Empire, pogroms occurred across much of Europe in the 19th Century. The pogroms were a major cause of the waves of Jewish emigration to America from the 1880s up to the beginning of the Great War.

The pogroms were why one of my "off the boat" great-aunts told me when I was very young: "When it is time for you to marry, better you should bring home a Shvartzer than a Catholic."

Conservative thinkers are not going through a pogrom. Not unless horsebacked riders from the Nation have been throwing firebombs into David Brooks's house. Not unless Palin and her daughters have been raped by drunken staffers from the Center for American Progress. Not unless Charles Krauthammer has been sabered in his wheelchair by bloggers from the Huffington Post.

Then you might call it a pogrom. Not before.