OOGA BOOGA. Now that Obama's surging, the folks at National Review Online, heretofore acting a little gunshy of the racial politicking for which their magazine was once known, are starting to inch closer to the tar baby.

Jonah Goldberg, using the wishful-thinking reading of Robert Putnam's research common among conservatives, announces that liberals only like Obama because they don't know how awful black people really are:

It’s easy for upscale liberals to talk about the glories of diversity because they live at Olympian heights, above the reality of multicultural America. For Obama’s wealthy, white, liberal supporters, diversity is knowing a rich black lawyer, a wealthy Latino accountant, and lots of well-to-do gay folks.

Whereas for Goldberg, diversity is running into Deroy Murdock at Starbucks. If the Pantload ever turned up on foot in my ethnically diverse (and very Democratic) Brooklyn neighborhood, it would be to cop black market trans-fats, I'm sure.

Meanwhile John Derbyshire, normally more inclined to plead for his right to homophobia, wraps his silk dressing gown tightly about his withered frame and totters onto the balcony to address the Negro Question. He allows he might have voted for Colin Powell, for even though Powell "could 'talk black' when he thought it was required of him... You could tell the guy's heart wasn't in it." He didn't like Powell's politics, mind, but at least Powell was a Republican, and if we're to have blackamoors in high office they should at least be of the right party.

Derbyshire's gotten kind of obsessive on the subject. He insists that others object on PC grounds to his flippant treatment of Obama -- though there is no evidence that anyone at National Review objects, nor that anyone outside those premises (besides me) even notices.

National Review seems to have degenerated since the days when it fought against Brown v. Board of Education; where once race-baiting was its own reward, now its practitioners have to be assured that they are speaking truth to power each time they call the Senator from Illinois "O'Bama." Now doubt they would cite their own reticence as proof of the all-oppressing power of political correctness if they weren't such equivocating pussies. But if Obama gets the nomination, maybe the volcanic pressure of long-suppressed emotions will push them into franker language. Well, that's just one more reason to hope.