UPDATE: Sargent just took to Twitter and called my quoting him directly “comical lies.” That seems to be a rather damning indictment of Greg Sargent about his own writing.

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Greg Sargent is whining at the Washington Post, not that I pointed out his calls for union violence in Wisconsin, but that at the very end, after all was said and done, I besmirched his journalism by writing this:

I believe Sargent was being sarcastic. The problem is that if I or Sarah Palin or anyone on the right had said something similar, Greg Sargent and his friends would never, ever extend us the courtesy of recognizing the sarcasm, etc. If you need proof, just dig around for Sargent’s writings about Sarah Palin’s target map.

Sargent says he went out of his way to not blame Sarah Palin for causing the violence in Arizona. Let’s ignore Sargent’s whining and instead look at his record.

Sargent wants us to ignore that when conservatives began defending Sarah Palin from those who blamed her, Greg Sargent himself wrote:

Conservatives push back: The rundown on why it’s supposedly unfair to tie the shooting to Sarah Palin’s now-infamous Dem/crosshairs map.

It is “supposedly” unfair to tie Palin and her map to the shooting. If Sargent has issues with me and his nuance, consider Sargent taking issue with Sarah Palin and her use of the word “purport.” Again, what’s good for the goose . . . .

But wait. There’s more!

Further, Sargent leaves out that he willfully hyped Sarah Palin’s defense against those accusations as if she had never been attacked and still managed to conclude his piece by implying that, in fact, her “incendiary rhetoric” had “potential consequences.”

Right here he distorts her video message to claim she said those “expressing concern and outrage about the shooting [were acting] in bad faith”. Actually, what she was saying is that Greg’s friends who were accusing her of instigating the attack on Giffords were acting in bad faith.

He must have missed that context.

Likewise, I guess Sargent missed the line where he says critics wanted Palin to “be more mindful of the potential consequences of incendiary rhetoric”. Those “potential consequences” I guess — since Sargent clearly is now saying he never blamed Palin in any way for what happened — have nothing to do with anything that actually happened.

Oh . . . right . . . that’s just what the “critics” are saying, not Sargent.

The irony here is that Sargent, back in 2010, denied that people on the left do what they accuse Andrew Breitbart of doing. In Sargent’s words:

if by “it” we mean purveying information to readers or viewers that’s designed only to achieve a political objective, with no effort whatsoever to ascertain its accuracy, true significance, or context, then the answer is: No, both sides don’t do it.

Really?

Sargent used his Washington Post platform to go after both the highly regarded Thomas Sowell and Sarah Palin for comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler — something neither of them did. Sowell’s column highlighted governments’ use of crises to expand government power. It also included a reference to Franklin Roosevelt. Sargent did not ask if Palin and Sowell were comparing Obama to FDR, just Hitler.

He also asked last year if there was a “Sarah Palin vileness/absurdity threshold”. Why? Because Joe McGinniss decided to stalk the Palin family, moving in next door to the Palin family in Alaska to write a book on her.

Sargent did not like that Palin was, to say the least, concerned. Again, why should we on the right give Sargent the benefit of the doubt that he was being “sarcastic” in his calls for union violence when he has a long history of never giving anyone on the right — especially Sarah Palin — the benefit of any doubt.

In fact, Greg Sargent has a history of using his Washington Post perch to serve as an in house mouthpiece for the Democrat’s spin and hackery.

He’s now reached the pinnacle of it by encouraging unions to commit violence in Wisconsin. But he was just being sarcastic.

Greg Sargent wants me to correct what I’ve written? He might want to correct himself first.