Henry Payne doesn't understand the Associated Press

I used to think he was just a little touched in the head. Now I think he just might be stupid.

That was the conclusion of the Associated Press Sunday in spinning the president's lies (debunked by media fact checkers) as a brilliant political strategy. "An unrelenting President Barack Obama jabbed at Mitt Romney's record with a private equity firm in an ad Saturday that aimed to keep his rival on the defensive," cheered the AP from Clifton, Virginia in a story that ran in every newspaper I checked while on the road in Ohio and West Virginia. Who needs a campaign spokesman when you have AP?

One can imagine Henry Payne going gas station to gas station and diner to diner, scrutinizing every newspaper -- including editions of the same newspaper -- for evidence of his plot that they're all in on the plot because all of them ran the exact same "Associated Press" story (how you draw a paycheck from a newspaper and not know why this is the case is anyone's guess). (We pause for a moment to allude to the headline in which the insidious Obama-media complex has once again conspired against horribly put-upon wealthy white person Willard Romney, while in the above snippeted paragraph pointing out that the crux of the idea that the charges are all false comes from the media itself.) As for the meat of his complaint, an easy comparison is to the drunk at the end of the bar, watching Monday Night Football, who shouts that Mike Tirico is hopelessly in the bag for the Patriots because he announced without spitting on the ground in disgust that Tom Brady completed a pass for a touchdown.

This has been the latest installment in our ongoing explorations of the "They're against me, they're all against me" mental state of Detroit News editorial cartoonist Henry Payne.