The manufactured controversy of Shirley Sherrod's speech to a local NAACP group in Georgia, like the manufactured controversy of the Obama Justice Department's treatment of the New Black Panther Party, are the kind of tempests in a teapot that Fox's alleged news shows like to display in the front window.

What Fox keeps in the back room are the hundreds of documented incidents of racism by members of the Tea Party and other conservatives. And what Fox keeps buried under the floorboards is the real racism that propels the right wing's agenda on immigration, health care reform, and deficit spending.

While it's easy to see the overt racism that propels the right's bidding war for who can hate the most on immigrants, it's harder to recognize the subtler racism that underlies the conservative opposition to health care reform and deficit spending to avert a depression. The common thread is racial prejudice and resentment.

Fox and the right wing make no bones about the fact that the goal of making Shirley Sherrod and the New Black Panther Party top stories is to illustrate the idea that the Obama administration coddles minorities and doesn't like whites so much. And with the popularity of the Arizona immigration law model comes the right's concurrent condemnation of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder as willing participants in a Latino invasion.

But health care reform? The deficit? What do those things have to do with racism?

Chip away at the high-minded arguments, seemingly irrelevant to race at first glance, and the glue binding the right's overarching narrative is the same used to stick Obama to the right's highly selective images of Shirley Sherrod, immigrants and the New Black Panther Party.

When applied to health car reform, the narrative becomes a vile portrait of an administration bent on killing every white person from Medicare beneficiaries to Sarah Palin's grandson, all while taxing the country into Michele Bachmann's "nation of slaves."

When the narrative is applied to deficit spending, the rationale of averting economic disaster gets lost and becomes a story of favoring the poor (blacks and other minorities) over whites who will end up paying the bill through taxes.

A few photo ops with blacks notwithstanding, right-wing politicians like Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle and Rand Paul all promote policies that lead to the destruction of minority communities, the disproportionate impoverishment of minority families, a greater strain on minority marriages, fewer educational opportunities for minorities and greater obstacles to political enfranchisement.

The Tea Party wanted a poster child for black racism in Shirley Sherrod. More than that, it wanted payback for the NAACP's resolution and another brick to throw through the Oval Office window at that scary black man inside.

So the reaction was predictable when Andrew "Who Me?" Breitbart's video snippet was picked up by Rupert Murdoch's networks and endlessly replayed as if the Challenger had just exploded. Tea Party sites soon posted Breitbart's video and like perverts aroused by their own racism, salaciously promoted it as more evidence of black presidents gone wild.

But the full story provided evidence not of Sherrod's racism, not of the NAACP's racism, and certainly not of the Obama administration's racism. It only gave more evidence that the right wing will grasp at any straw to supplant the story of its own widespread racism against minorities with tall tales of government sanctioned racism against whites.

There simply is no comparison between Shirley Sherrod and the racism that propels so many Tea Party signs, hundreds of hours of Fox incite-tainment and the vile policies that erode the lives of millions of minority Americans each and every day.