After the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15, a columnist at Salon expressed his wish for a Caucasian villain, and he did get his wish — not a blond, blue-eyed Nazi or Bull Connor wannabe, but a Chechen from the actual Caucasus, an immigrant, and a Muslim, and the deflation was visible.

After Gates-gate, when Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested and handcuffed in his own home by a white policeman James Crowley, whom Obama had said “acted stupidly,” white liberals and the race-grievance industry hoped they had found their Bull Connor wannabe, and were again disappointed.