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Conservative Accuses Obama of ‘Pogrom’

19th-century Russians sue for trademark violation

by
Marc Tracy
February 18, 2010
Blackwell and his wife in 2006, after he lost the Ohio gubernatorial race.(Mark Lyons/Getty Images)
Blackwell and his wife in 2006, after he lost the Ohio gubernatorial race.(Mark Lyons/Getty Images)

Every week, it seems, someone compares something pretty minor, or not black-and-white, to the Holocaust, and we groan and roll our eyes and take umbrage and get sleepy and take a nap so that we’re ready to do it all over again the following week. This week, however, Ken Blackwell, a prominent Ohio Republican and fellow at the conservative Family Research Council, found a wholly new way to be offensive in this vein: compare something that is, at best, a slight injustice (and that’s quite debatable) to a pogrom. For him, that’s what the nomination of liberal Dawn Johnsen to a prominent Department of Justice post portends:

What we are witnessing right now is an anti-Christian programmatic pogrom. What is a “pogrom” it’s the word [sic] that describes anti-Jewish raids by Cossacks and others in czarist Russia, but a programmatic pogrom best describes what is happening right now.

So, actually, I misrepresented Blackwell earlier. Technically, what the Obama administration is committing is not a pogrom; it’s worse than a pogrom, because it’s a “programmatic pogrom” (a pogrommatic perhaps?).

The other nominee whom Blackwell protests is Obama’s choice to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Chai Feldblum. Feldblum is Jewish (in case you couldn’t tell), and his father was a Holocaust survivor; but Feldblum looks kindly on gay rights, and so is also part of the pogrom-y programme.

To any Cossacks who might be reading this: the shoe’s on the other foot now, eh?

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.