I’ve noticed a curious silence from the “Save Darfur” crowd in recent months. When I lived in DC, it seemed that my neighbors attended Darfur rallies as frequently as their ancestors attended church. I once even attended one of those silly spectacles of feigned moral outrage. As I no longer live in that cesspool of sanctimony, I am not surprised that I no longer hear Darfur frequently discussed by those around me. The national media, however, also seem to be much quieter on this issue, which does require some explanation.

Being interested in these kinds of trends, I did a LexisNexis search for U.S. newspaper and wire stories that included both the words “Darfur” and “Genocide.” During the second term of the Bush Administration, major print media outlets published an average of 27.33 stories per month about genocide in Darfur. Since Obama’s inauguration, however, that number has dropped to 14.33 stories per month. My suspicion is that the change in coverage is not related to any meaningful change in conditions.

Bernie Goldberg used to note that Bill Clinton “solved” America’s homeless problem – at least as far as the media was concerned. After his inauguration, the mainstream press simply stopped covering homelessness as a major issue, even though the total number of homeless Americans was unchanged. Apparently homelessness is only an “epidemic” if a Republican is in the White House.

I suspect something similar is involved with the decline of Darfur as a major concern of the mainstream Left. Rallies about suffering in that particularly unpleasant part of the world made for a better narrative during the Bush years. The unspoken premise of those rallies and op/eds was that America callously stood by and allowed this “genocide” to happen because Bush was too racist to save black Africans. By pretending to care about Darfur, white liberals were able to demonstrate their moral superiority, particularly in comparison to their much-hated president.

Unfortunately for these particularly-trendy liberals, Obama’s presence in the White House makes it awkward for them to denounce their government’s disregard for Africa. It is therefore better for them to simply drop the issue. Maybe they can go back to pretending to care about Tibet, or whatever.

I am sure it does not matter one way or the other to the people actually living in Darfur. No American really wanted to “do something” about the Sudan, despite the incessant cries to the contrary – I refuse to believe that these liberals honestly wanted to ensnare the US in yet another war in a majority-Muslim country, and I assume that’s what “do something” means. The residents of Darfur have lost nothing but their role as a prop in American pageants of moral preening.