It's Rove vs. Kos at Newsweek

Boy, talk about an unfair fight:

Less than three months after leaving the Bush White House, Karl Rove is becoming a member of a community not all that popular with administration officials: the media.

Newsweek has signed the president's former deputy chief of staff as a commentator who will turn out several columns on the 2008 campaign through inauguration day. The move is not likely to prove popular among liberals who believe the mainstream media have been too soft on the Bush administration.

"We want to give readers a feel for what it's like to be on the inside," says Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham. "Our readers are sophisticated enough to know that what they get from Karl has to be judged in the context of who Karl is...Readers will have to decide if he's simply an apologist."

Newsweek (which is owned by The Washington Post Co.) will announce tomorrow that it is granting regular space to both Rove and Markos Moulitsas, the liberal firebrand who founded the Web site Daily Kos. "I'm fully prepared for both the right-wing and left-wing blogosphere to be outraged, which means we're doing our job," Meacham says.

No promoter would agree to book this match. In Rove you've got a guy whose actually done something. He's helped engineer election wins at both the governor and presidential levels. He's been the right hand man to the most powerful politician in the country.

On the left Kos leads an unruly band of lefties that has an unusually high percentage of complete nuts. He's promised much and delivered very little at the electoral level. His site is all heat and no light.

I doubt these guys will be directly responding to each other, and that's certainly good news for Kos. Rove would hand him his head.

Rove will be able to add some important insight into the election. Kos won't because he has no idea what it takes to run a winning campaign. All he can add is noise.