I don’t think so but his meteoric rise may be coming to an end. He may be a big fish in a small pond but it looks like the bigger fish in the big pond are prepared to eat him alive if he dares to jump in.

Newsweek has an article titled The War’s Left Front which starts out nice enough:

July 3-10, 2006 issue - Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is sitting on his back porch in Berkeley, Calif., listening to the hummingbirds and explaining his plans to seize control of the Democratic Party. It is one week after YearlyKos, the Las Vegas conference of progressives that Moulitsas sponsored and promoted heavily on his popular liberal blog, DailyKos.com. Every major media outlet in the country had attended the conference, detailing the spectacle of Democratic bigwigs (including the party’s Senate minority leader and four of its leading 2008 presidential aspirants) embracing Moulitsas as the guru of an activist movement they were eager to exploit.

but gets ugly fast.

Moulitsas is also learning another downside of membership in the elite: the bigger the liberal sniper gets, the more incoming fire he faces. The talk of the blogosphere last week was “Kosola”—allegations that Moulitsas wrote favorably about candidates with whom he or his close friend and coauthor Jerome Armstrong had financial relationships. Moulitsas swore the charges were baseless (Armstrong, too, has denied impropriety), but they clearly got under his skin. When The New Republic’s Web site published an e-mail from Moulitsas to a group of friendly activists urging them not to talk about Kosola and thus “starve it of oxygen,” Moulitsas went berserk in a blog posting, accusing the venerable liberal journal of treason. By the weekend, Moulitsas’s allies were sending each other e-mails infected with the paranoia of revolutionaries who’ve gained power too fast: How should they deal with traitors? How much openness could they handle? Which fellow travelers could they really trust?

Yet some Dems fear that Moulitsas’s popularity will pull the party so far to the left that it won’t be able to win the general election in 2008. “It’s a little bit like ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ with these guys,” said an aide to a Democratic presidential candidate who asked not to be identified while the boss was angling for Moulitsas’s support. “You like what they’re saying when they’re coming in, but you don’t know what they’re going to do once you let them into your house.”

Moulitsas’s targeting of Lieberman angers some Democrats, who argue that at a time when the party faces tough odds of taking back the Senate, there are better targets than a popular incumbent.

The pressure on Moulitsas—to be consistent, to be pragmatic, to win—will only grow as the fall elections approach. Already, the strain of the spotlight is beginning to show in his growing belligerence and paranoia. When Kosola broke, Moulitsas e-mailed fellow progressive activists, wondering who might be shopping the story. “I’ve gotten reliable tips that Hillary’s operation has been digging around my past (something I confronted them about, btw, and never got a denial), and you know the Lieberman/DLC/TNR camp is digging as well,” he wrote, referring to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and The New Republic. (Aides to Senators Clinton and Lieberman deny the allegations in the e-mails.)

Ann Althouse has a great post covering the Newsweek story and Kos’ new found influence and fame:

Kos’s writing style — which has obviously served him well as a blogger up to this point — sounds angry and crazed to the outsider. It’s easy to get him to react with “belligerence and paranoia,” and the more successful he is, the more Democrats are motivated to marginalize and disqualify him. Those he’s accused of “digging around in my past” have denied that they’re doing it, but, really, why wouldn’t they be doing it? And why wouldn’t part of their strategy be to make him think that they are so they can lure him into displaying more of that “belligerence and paranoia”?

So I assume there is a conspiracy and a strategy to investigate Kos. And it’s so easy to do because it can succeed even if it fails to turn anything up, because it will provoke him, and when he reacts, they’ll all say he’s paranoid, belligerent. Escort that man back outside the gate.

And if he exhibits these suspicions, he’s going to look crazy. And you know what they do to you once they have the material to make you look cra-ray-zee.

Hugh Hewitt has taken to calling him Kosputin. As Hewitt fans know once he set’s his sights on a particular journalist/politician he can be relentless.

The Scratching Post has an interesting post posing that this is not about Kos but about big medias eventual downfall to new media:

Some commenter somewhere said that you can bring down Kos or his buddies and he will be replaced instantly. It’s the model that counts, not the individual. I think that was right on. Whether it’s Kos or Glenn Reynolds or Hugh Hewitt, it’s the model that’s changing. Alvin Toffler has written best sellers about these kinds of conflicts between societal models. The Civil War, for example, was a battle between an agrarian way of life and an industrial way of life. In the end, the new model won out. The South won several battles, but the outcome of the war was almost predetermined because of the immense advantages of the North.

In this case, big media is winning a battle while losing a war.

The Mahablog thinks the real target may be Mark Warner.