One would assume that Fox, as the network for the right wing, worships the "free market." Yet, the decision, by major retailers, to remove Confederate flags and tchotchke doesn't sit well with Steve Doocy and Allen West because, you see, the stars and bars had nothing to do with the Charlestown massacre.

Doocy began by describing the "feeding frenzy" of business that are now eliminating Confederate flags and associated memorabilia. He tossed to West who says, according to Doocy, that "this is all part of manufactured political frenzy." West quoted liberal Democrats who recommended "never letting a good crisis go to waste" and that this is what "the liberal progressive left is doing" by creating a "manufactured political crisis to keep people distracted from what is really going on."

He said that while the Charlestown deaths were terrible, the real problem is that more young black men are killed in Chicago than in the Iraq combat zone. He cited the "decimation" of the black family since the "Great Society" legislation. Doocy said "sure" when West said that "this is what we should be talking about, not a piece of cloth."

Doocy said "to keep in mind, the flag had nothing to do with the murders" and that even though Dylann Roof posed with the Confederate flag, "it had nothing to do with the murders, it had something to do with him." While West acknowledged that Roof is "a racist sociopath...that has nothing to do with that Confederate flag."

West credited Nikki Haley's reaction to the situation but added that there is an overreaction and cited, as an example, Sen. Harry Reid's suggestion that a Nevada college should change its mascot from "Running Rebels." He asked "what does that have to do with what happened in South Carolina?"

He criticized manufacturers who are "caught up in this frenzy" because "that's not how the market should  react and that's not how retailers should be reacting because then they become pawns to the politicized message of the left."

So rather than admit that the Dylann Roof's ugly racism was fueled by the racist tradition of the Confederate flag, one under which Allen's West's ancestors were brutalized and segregated, our erstwhile hosts used the removal of the Confederate flag to propagandize against liberals and lambaste the free market for engaging in a "feeding frenzy." And if West really cares about the plight of African-Americans, maybe he should focus on systemic inequities in the justice system, employment discrimination, and voter suppression.

Talk about a "manufactured political crisis."