Yesterday, the Atlantic published the definitive behind-the-scenes guide to Hillary Clinton's campaign nosedive, including a trove of e-mails which offered everything you'd want: Name-calling! Illegally parked cars! Mark Penn being a total prick! Good times. But embarrassing political or corporate leaks are nothing new. Whenever a major politician or company starts to tank, underlings usually get fidgety and eventually someone starts forwarding messages not meant for (but totally suited to) public consumption. Here are some of our favorite from the last couple of years:

• In 2003, Bill Gates sent a hilarious rambling complaint to Microsoft employees about how he couldn't make Windows XP work. Amused employees went ahead with the embarrassing forward: "Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night—why should I reboot at that time? So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it."

• Who can forget the now-infamous Downing Street memo, which is actually a set of notes from a meeting of UK government officials in which it was revealed President George Bush had been planning to remove Saddam Hussein since 2002? The leak quickly secured itself in the top 10 leaks of all time.

• ABC, feeling a little bitter over NBC's success with The Office, sent this note to executive producers earlier this year on how to rip off foreign formats without all that costly licensing. Which was of course promptly forwarded to Nikki Finke. Needless to say, the Brits weren't very happy.

• A Yahoo vice president compared the company's problems in 2006 to spreading peanut butter too thinly on a piece of toast. Turns out the kicker was too good not to be distributed: "I hate peanut butter," he said. "We all should."

• Media mogul Barry Diller extolled his employees' virtues in a March memo, using acres of space to tout his companies for suggesting that they "please ... ignore" the massive suits and counter-suits between IAC and Liberty Media. Of course, that didn't save said employees from being canned ... by Diller.

• Only two days before he was himself canned (sorry, resigned), former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld penned a revealing memo on alternative options for the failing Iraq War, which was then leaked by some extremely brave soul. "Clearly," he said, "what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough."

• JPMorgan Chase gave foreclosed homeowners a small victory by letting loose this helpful newsletter to employees on "Cheats & Tricks" for getting risky mortgage loans approved by the company's internal system. Thanks, banks!

• Former FEMA head Michael Brown showed a slight lack of sensitivity when he told rescue officials deployed to help victims of Hurricane Katrina that they should "convey a positive image" of the federal government's efforts. Some pissy patriot had apparently had enough and went ahead with the forward.

• In April, IBM's offices ditched their PC hardware and allowed 22 employees to test out some Macs at their desks. Most of them reported they were happy to abandon their own company's product.

• And not to be outdone, just last week, a note leaked from the John McCain campaign telling officials to keep going negative, portraying Barack Obama as a "job killing machine."

Is it not a small wonder that anyone with anything at all to lose uses any form of written communication anymore?