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If you thought, after watching the two segments of Jon Stewart's interview with Bill O'Reilly this week, that Stewart landed some telling observations, but he seemed to pull his punches a bit -- or at least they seemed to have been pulled for him -- you were right.

If you also noticed, as I did while making the clip, that the segments were pretty hamhandedly edited -- the continuity, especially in terms of Stewart's demeanor, was jarring -- it turns out you were also right.

Fox actually put the entire, unedited version of the interview up on its site, and the difference is jaw-dropping.

John Cook at Gawker (with the help of a couple of interns) got ahold of the full interview first, and provides a nice dissection that you should read (and watch) in full.

We've clipped some of the highlights for our own video, above.

If nothing else, the unedited video will be long remembered for the following quip:

I know what this is. I come from Jersey—it's the same thing: "I'm not saying your mother's a whore. I'm just saying she has sex for money. With people." [F]ox News used to be all about, you don't criticize a president during wartime. It's unacceptable, it's treasonous, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. All of a sudden, for some reason you can run out there and say, "Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country."

Though I also thought this exchange was perhaps the most telling:

Stewart: But let's go into this. Because all I hear on your network is, this guy is -- it's tyranny, and socialism.

O'Reilly: That's what he believes.

Stewart: So, how is Barack Obama a socialist? As far as I can see, the majority of the billions of dollars he's given, he's given to banks. So if he is a socialist, he's dyslexic! Because when you redistribute the wealth, it's supposed to be going to --

O'Reilly: But he does believe in redistribution of income.

Stewart: Well, he's redistributed it to the banks.

O'Reilly: And that is a socialist tenet -- no, he's redistributing it --

Stewart: He's going up. He's dyslexic! It's supposed to be coming down!

O'Reilly: He -- Look. If you don't know that the Obama administration is redistributing income, then I'm gonna have to haul your program away from you. Get you off the air.

Stewart: Let me ask you: What is different about his redistribution of income and all other presidents -- he wants to raise the marginal tax rate back to where it was during the Clinton era. Was Clinton a socialist?

O'Reilly: He has promoted a variety of programs, OK, that --

Stewart: We already have Medicare, right? We have Medicaid. We have Social Security. Are we a socialist country? Do you want to get rid of those three?

O'Reilly: No.

Stewart: So are we a socialist country?

O'Reilly: But I want to moderate them so we don't go bankrupt.

Stewart: OK, but that's different. Now you're talking about fiscal responsibility.

O'Reilly: In a socialist country, the government pays for all of these entitlements -- the Obama administration is down that path.

Stewart: Who pays for Medicare? Who pays for Medicaid?

O'Reilly: The government pays for it.

Stewart: So now we're socialist.

O'Reilly: But now we're on Medicaid and Medicare with steroids, with the new health care bill. That's steroids!

Stewart: Once again, this is like the old joke. "Would you sleep with me for ten dollars?" "No." "Would you sleep with me for a million?" "OK." So now we know what you are, you're just negotiating price. For you guys to stand up --

O'Reilly: Of course, that's the degree of anybody when you describe socialism. There are little socialistic programs and giant socialist programs. OK? And some people believe that Obama is on the huge government creation -- the government dominance. And you yourself said it! You yourself said it! He wants more regulation, he wants to create things, he wants big government.

Stewart: But he's given back so much executive power!

O'Reilly: What?

Stewart: Executive power!

O'Reilly: He hasn't given back anything. He just hasn't handled the Congress. He doesn't know how to handle them yet. That's inexperience. Now --

Stewart: So he's not a tyrant. Because if he's a tyrant, then he's pretty lame for a tyrant.

O'Reilly: I don't object --

Stewart: How many tyrants do you know that really suffer because they can't get cloture? Very few.

OK, OK. So it wasn't a literal evisceration. Stewart did not unzip O'Reilly from scrote to sternum and empty out his intestines. We understand that he's a tad sensitive about how his takedowns are described these days.

Still, you can sure see why O'Reilly's producers edited this stuff out. Lord knows the regular septuagenarian Bold/Fresh audience would have fainted dead away.

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Bill O'Reilly is such a narcissist that he didn't bother discussing President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech -- which was one of the most newsworthy items of the day yesterday -- until the second half of his show. Nope, first on his list of priorities was to rant and rave about a fictional TV show that dared to have a character who openly called out O'Reilly and his conservative colleagues for the hatemongering nativists they really are.

That's all it takes to set off patented BillO Rampage. 'Law and Order' is just out of control for O'Reilly, and the show's creator, Dick Wolf, is his target.

L&O: Garrison, Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, all of them. They are like a cancer spreading ignorance and hate. They have convinced folks that immigrants are the problem, not corporations that failed to pay a living wage, or a broken health care system.

O'Reilly: That is defamatory.

Bill, this is not reality. Then again, Bill believes George C. Scott's portrayal of Patton was real too. BillO then proceeds to play a few select clips from 2005 and earlier where he actually sounded (albeit ever so briefly) like he was defending poor illegal immigrants on his show. Sorry Bill, we know better, and so does Geraldo Rivera. I guess he forgot this meltdown between the two over BillO's vilification of illegals in the country.

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Here's a flashback from Apr 04, 2007:

GERALDO: "Cool your jets! It has nothing to do with illegal aliens...it has to do with drunk driving! Don't obscure a tragedy to make a cheap political point. It is a cheap political point and you know it!!"

As Silent Patriot noted, Bill did the same thing with the tragic Bronx fire just the month before. He just loves exploiting these isolated incidents to, as Geraldo says, to make "cheap political points."

Back then, Oliver Willis pointed out: "A young girl was tragically killed by a drunk driver. But this was not enough for O'Reilly. Instead, because the criminal was an illegal alien he added this incident to his ongoing crusade against the brown people. Luckily Geraldo was on the show and he - to his credit - called out O'Reilly's xenophobia for exactly what it was. This drove Bill O'Reilly insane. I was almost certain he was going to reach across the table and hit Geraldo."

Ah, but really, he's a nice guy now. Really.

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What hath Republicans wrought?

Sure, they believed, as John noted the other day, that when they were unleashing what Bill Kristol likes to call "guided populism", they were in fact opening the gates for right-wing populism. And now they're looking not only at a a phenomenon much more popular than the standard Republican brand, but a movement that is about to swallow them whole.

And the Tea Party organizers -- notably the Astroturf outfits that originated the Parties, such as FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity -- are making that perfectly clear. Two spokesmen for those groups -- Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks and the AFP's Tim Phillips, went on Hardball yesterday and made this explicit:

MATTHEWS: Matt, how about third party? What about the Tea Party? Sarah Palin is kind of hard to read. She is fascinating. Let‘s face it, we‘re all fascinated with her, because she‘s exciting as a political figure right now. But she‘s talking third party. I mean, she answered the question of Lars Larson. Maybe it just came to mind, but she said, yeah, I might go third party, something like that. Would you guys knock off an incumbent Republican by going third party? You know how the vote splits. Split the right, the Dem wins.

KIBBE: The better way to do it is to take over the Republican party. Frankly, that‘s what our goal is. We need to replace the Republican establishment with fiscal conservatives that are actually willing to cut spending.

All this talk about a "third party" is just so much smokescreen. What's actually happening is that the GOP is fast becoming a full-fledged right-wing-populist entity. Which means that the latent extremism lurking out on the right's fringes for so many years is becoming its new lifeblood, such as it is.

Funny thing is, as Matthews managed to point out early in the segment, not even the Tea Partiers' supposed hero -- Ronald Reagan -- can live up to their standards:

MATTHEWS: Has there ever been a strong conservative president, for example, in your lifetime or anybody—your grandfather‘s lifetime? Who do you look to as a good role model for the tea party people?

KIBBE: Well, obviously, Ronald Reagan is the closest thing we have.

MATTHEWS: What did he do in terms of fiscal policy?

KIBBE: Oh, he—he said that we shouldn't spend money we don‘t have, and he said that the government shouldn't get involved in things that it‘s not very good at doing.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Yes. Have you ever checked the numbers with Reagan?

KIBBE: Well, I understand. I understand...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: The national debt went from under $1 trillion to $3 trillion. He did more to increase exponentially the size of the debt of any president in history.

And he's your role model.

KIBBE: Well, President Obama is...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No, I'm asking you. I have asked you one president that you can look up to who was good at tea party politics and ideology.

KIBBE: Right. Right.

MATTHEWS: If it's not Reagan, because he clearly didn't do it, who do you look to? Coolidge? How far do you have to look back?

KIBBE: I think we need to find somebody that can meet that standard.

MATTHEWS: So, nobody has recently?

KIBBE: No, certainly not.

Ah well. Blowing off cognitive dissonance is a special teabagger trait. It just adds to their "insane" mystique.

Republicans may have thought these guys had their backs. But now they're looking with increasing worry back over their shoulders. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, dudes.