Teabagger Mark Williams got terribly upset with Geraldo Rivera for a segment Fox aired just before they brought him on to ask whether the tea party movement should be worried about being painted as extremists.

Williams: Well as long as you keep helping them with hit pieces like the one you just ran. The tea party movement is a political movement based on...

Geraldo: Which hit piece was that Mark? Which hit piece was that?

Williams: ... based on the Constitution Geraldo. That piece mixing militias and Timothy McVeigh and the people who love their country and the Constitution. We are a human rights movement. America is the only society in the history of the world founded on the notion that governments exist to protect individual human rights and liberties. That's being taken away from this country. It's impossible for these people to be militias or to be racists.

Yeah right. This is coming from this guy -- Teabagger Mark Williams says: 'Obama is an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief' and tries to defend it!. Real sweetheart there. Williams goes on to lie and say that Congressman Lewis recanted his story that he was spat on. As Ellen at Newshounds points out, that's just the latest right wing conspiracy theory.

Maybe because it’s not true. Williams might have been thinking of Congressman Heath Shuler who has denied having heard the n-word at the protest on Capitol Hill the day health care reform legislation passed. But Cleaver has not recanted. In fact, here’s a video of him being spat on. (at about 1:15, found via Gawker.)

Williams then went off on a tirade, screaming at Geraldo.

Williams: We’re the ones who were egged, we were the ones who were physically attacked in some cases and our minority members received the most vile, hateful, racist emails. ...

What is it about America and the Constitution that frightens you, Geraldo? What is it about this country and engaged citizenry… what is it that frightens you?

Geraldo: You're going to be what frightens me.

Geraldo then runs to Mike Huckabee to get the tone of the show calmed down and the conversation away from crazy-ass Mark Williams. Yeah that's right. Mark Williams made Mike Huckabee look like the voice of reason in this segment. That takes some doing. The Newshounds article has more on Geraldo's lack of fact checking here.

So what set Williams off besides Geraldo daring to say that the tea party movement might not benefit from being associated with racists and militia groups?

Watching this segment just before he was allowed in the air.

This is what Mark Williams called a "hit piece". No Mark, this is a hit piece.

Al Gore says it all to Fox's Jesse Waters: 'I don't like ambush journalism'. Not to mention the lying.

And this is a hit piece.

BillO camera crew ambushs Cynthia Tucker

The Geraldo piece on right wing extremists looks like Fox deciding to do something that actually resembles some honest journalism for once, not that we've seen any of the networks do much honest reporting on the movement at all, like calling the protesters what they are, the pissed off Republican base. I'm surprised they allowed him to air it given that Fox has been promoting these tea parties along with the corporate astroturf groups who fund them.