While I'm not particularly into journalistic hype, it's hard to resist digging into a piece that starts like this:

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.

Need more details?

It seems as though the rock-thrower is growing up. Inside, a handyman is remodeling the Moulitsases' suburban living room, where soon the futon will be replaced by a daybed, and the big, boxy television by a sleek new flat-panel.

I've never been a fan of Kos, and I'm still not. But when I see deliberate attempts to influence me by cluttering my mind with irrelevant details, I tend to resist instinctively. And right now, I feel like defending someone I've tended to regard the way one might regard an angry weasel. I never liked Kos (and said so), and I never thought of Daily Kos as a true blog. It's been accurately described as a hive, as it's a huge labyrinth of activity with more writers than probably even Kos can count at any moment in time. Fine for what it is, and I know people like it, but I just can't think of it as a real blog.

Whatever anyone might call the site, Kos has been hugely successful. Still, this was news to me:

. . .in 2003, [] he rose to prominence filling Howard Dean's Internet piggy bank. . .

But never mind. He's now gone from piggy banks to body snatching. So says one nameless Democrat:

By 2006, Daily Kos was drawing some 600,000 hits a day, and Moulitsas's anger over the war—and the Dems' failure to hold Bush accountable—had reached a fever pitch. 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."

You'd think that anyone who'd risen from rockthrowing piggy-bank-filler to body-snatcher of the Democratic Party might warrant, um, a background check, possibly? An investigation, maybe? You know, by the people whose bodies are about to be snatched? They can afford a couple of hundred dollars for the same private investigators who do that sort of thing for humdrum things like divorce proceedings and searches for deadbeat dads.

I think it's reasonable to assume that Kos knows enough about the way the world works to anticipate something like that.

Ah, but no. For even having such thoughts, it's call-the-shrink time. Kos is clearly suffering from "belligerence." And "paranoia":

. . .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.)

Newsweek leaves the now paranoid body-snatcher-with-grandiose-plans "back on the porch." (why, that's exactly where he was when the piece started) mouthing strange utterances about Jon Stewart, and radar:

Back on the porch in Berkeley, Moulitsas shows he's learned at least one key trick of being an insider: setting low expectations. "We're going to lose a lot of races this year and a lot of races in '08," he says. "The goals of this movement are long term." Still, he knows that superstardom comes with a time limit. "I'm the flavor of the month; it could be someone else in five months or a year." To avoid an early flameout, he's "going dark" for two to three months so he can focus on his "real work, which is talking about these races and issues." He pauses for a moment, thinking over the implications of what he's just said. "Well, there are always exceptions ... I'd make an exception for Jon Stewart." He pauses again so as not to talk over the handyman's high-powered vacuum. "The reality is I can't go under the radar. There's a point of no return."

(Never imagined I'd defend him, though.)