The body of the message began with the phrase “shamelessly misrepresented,” continued on to refer to “your hackneyed storyline” and concluded: “Fabrication is a legitimate tool – for fiction. You should try it; it suits you.”

The sender was one James F. Carney, then a spokesman for Vice President Biden, now the incoming White House press secretary. I mentioned the e-mail to colleagues and was surprised to learn that some of them, too, had received the occasional nastygram from Carney, sometimes graced with a barnyard epithet. Happily, these official White House correspondences will be stored for eternity in the National Archives, along with the Declaration of Independence…

There’s a suspicion among some of Carney’s former colleagues that he’s almost been set up to fail – much like Bill Clinton’s first press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, who had the title of press secretary but none of the necessary clout. Not only does Carney report to communications director Dan Pfeiffer (a decade his junior) but so does everybody else in the press office.