It's not fun, having to apply a therapeutic reading to some of the Washington press corps's most inscrutable minds. We really don't want to know—and don't have the requisite time to learn—about the fears haunting Politico senior writer Mike Allen, a man in his 40s who refuses to show or tell any of his friends where he lives. But it is the only reading that lends any sort of sense to this three-page dumping of tribal insecurities and resentment that Allen and Politico editor Jim VandeHei blasted out to the world in this latest, most cringeworthy episode of "Behind the Curtain."

The column is an early and ham-fisted attempt to preemptively smear an upcoming book from well-regarded New York Times Magazine features writer Mark Leibovich. This Town: The Way it Works in Suck Up City, set for release in mid-July, has been in the works for a couple of years, and promises to tell all about the "incestuous ecology" of D.C.'s social scene of media and political elites—coming from an author who's put in his time as a member of said scene, and may finally be experiencing the sort of spiritual awakening that now allows him to share freely.

Politico attempts to pass off its column as a neutral, "fun" look at an anticipated Beltway book that's still under the lockdown of a particularly stringent publisher's embargo. But Allen and VandeHei don't do the discretion thing very well, and it's clear before long that this is their clunky attempt to kneecap a writer whose upcoming revelations may well depict them as the people that they are: obsessive insiders who are obsessed with insiderism. It's bad flack work—something that exists to irritate and cut off reporters, not to have them adopt it into their own lead-story editorial product.

This Town has been in the works since shortly after the 2010 midterm elections and, as someone who's been booked to review it whenever it comes out, I've been keeping an eye on the developments surrounding its (delayed, and delayed) release. Its backstory is one of those unnecessarily complicated "Beltway insider" strings of media gossip that's sort of funny in the end, assuming you don't commit suicide midway through the telling.

Politico has been fretting about its release for years now. Here, for example, is a media story from March 2011 titled "Politico Not Fretting Over NYT Leibovich's Book," a headline that confirmed, without a doubt, that Politico was sleepless in terror over the prospect of its release.