Okay, I'm not making this up. AP has lied AGAIN (again). This is absolutely bizarre.

The Associated Press is melting down. They've apparently issued some kind of statement to respond to all the criticism they've received for outright lying, making unsubstantiated accusations, and intentionally misleading readers in repeated stories about Senator Harry Reid. And their statement, according to Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, is again a lie and inaccurate.

Josh has more. And TPM Muckraker will be going through the entire AP statement tomorrow. But it seems that the AP statement was written by someone who hadn't even read the criticism and didn't even understand the underlying facts of the story. It's simply bizarre.

Not to mention, incredibly unprofessional and unethical.

UPDATE: You can find AP's statement here. Shorter AP - It depends on what the definition of "is" is. You haven't read parsing and obfuscation until you've read AP's statement, published by Media Matters. In a nutshell, AP tries to get you caught in the weeds of the argument while totally ingnoring the most damning charge. Namely, that AP intentionally misled their readers via numerous sentences in several stories meant to have the reader reach a conclusion that was untrue and unsupported by the facts. AP quite clearly led their readers to believe that Harry Reid's actions were considered unethical by the Senate rules (wrong) and that Harry Reid admitted as much (wrong). And that wasn't the only misleading part of the stories.

It is amazing that AP thinks we're all going to just ignore their lies and misdirection simply because they give us a bunch of legalese that doesn't even address the main concerns we raised. This story isn't going away.

It is, however, funny to see AP act like every other company that's been caught lying about their partisan bias. From AOL to Microsoft to Ford, they move to the far-right thinking you didn't notice, then when they get caught they first ignore you, then deny it, then give you detailed lies about it, and finally after their credibility has been drawn through the mud and is sinking fast, they finally fess up. (AP might want to read its Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.)

It's going to be fun watching AP destroy its own brand over the next few weeks defending a reporter who thought he was taking on the white whale, but in fact was taking on the entire progressive Internet - a couple million rather angry folks who no longer take bullshit for an answer.