This is what happens when you are required to sound properly cynical on very short notice: MORE »

Halperin and co. inadvertently reveal Tom DeLay’s cunning plan to preserve the Republican majority:

Alternatively: Nice to know someone else is as hungover as we are today. MORE »

See, this is why we don’t let well-meaning liberals read The Note. It just upsets them: MORE »

We weren’t going to bother today, but their tireless insistence that people really oughtta care about whatever the hell Bush is going on about this week is kinda cute. MORE »

Actually, today The Note doesn’t need decoding. Today The Note gets honest. Here’s an excerpt: MORE »

A Deep Cover Wonkette Operative notes The Note’s rather far-flung search for positive reactions to last night’s Big Speech: MORE »

We tried, honestly, on what promises to be our swan song in Wonkette guest-blogging, to lay off the devoted practitioners of the Halperinite Tendency over at ABC. Be gracious in retiring, we told ourselves; spare a kind word, or at least a circumspect silence for the language-mangling media elitists who thrill to each fresh beat of Dan Bartlett’s heart. But our better angels did not conquer. As we let our eyes rest on the practiced vacuities slithering out of the many-fingered beast that is Team Note, we could remain silent no longer. Consider, first of all, today’s Notely overture:
There is some elaborate seasoned-pol style throat clearing to the effect of “the Clinton White House was leaky; the Bush one not so much.” Only, you know, delivered in three hundred so words of preening self-congratulation, for having been so close to so many powerful apparatchiks for so long. Then, the irrelevant, though no less irritating aside:

Out goes the elaborate lede we had written based on yet another leak (the early reviews of Tim Kaine’s State of the Union response preps, which we will save for a non-rainy day). Instead here is our insider report on this morning’s White House senior staff meeting.

Yes, because the lead (or, if you must, Note, “lede”) you have selected instead is so much less fucking elaborate. And correct us if we are wrong, but aren’t you all publicly congratulating yourselves for receiving a White House-orchestrated piece of pre-debate smear in the classic Rove-Bartlett vintage? This tickles your pride as journalists how, exactly?

More Notely questions after the jump.

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We didn’t make it past the Note’s hilarious fake Iraqi election exit poll. The one they funded by selling off on “vintage, eBay-ready Note Notebooks.” Complete with fake exit poll hotline! There will likely be fake results! Not unlike 2004. MORE »

Today’s echt-insider installment of the Note’s advice to the White House macher class has inspired us to compose our own coy rhetorical Notley query to our fetching president: Really, why have Don Rumsfeld kick around the press, when the Halperinite Retinue of Livery-Clad Servants will do the same job, for free? Yes, Gang of 500, the twittering Notesters sure do have your number–laying out their own expert channeling of your innermost desires, based, as they report, on: MORE »

Today, the plucky Halperinites seek to ventriloquize their own Xmas wish list through the harried minds of Congressional leaders Frist and Hastert. See, it’s just like visiting Santa, only you have little wooden scale models of wish-granters sitting on your knee. The only thing is, they still have some quaint desire to dress up these thought experiments as something resembling journalism–so cute!–so the whole thing is packaged as a sober laundry list of self-contradictory advice from the Hill’s major domos to our dead sexy president. But not long into the exercise, you get a strong whiff indeed of the musky longings of senior Notesters.

Awkward examples and explications after the jump.

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Today’ Note raises some interesting questions, among them:

Q: Is it really true that “the last Tuesday of every month is reserved for The Note’s ‘Best of . . .’ feature”?
A: No.

Q: Then why go through the trouble of using such a hackneyed format?
A: Because it’s easier than actually analyzing the news.

More secrets revealed after the jump.

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