“I don’t think they’ll be performing together soon,” said Kinsley. From the look on his face it didn’t seem too likely he’d be sharing a mike with Matt again in the near future.

Kinsley, of course, was a regular presence on the Sunday talk shows during his New Republic days (and ultimately of course cohosted his own, CNN’s “Crossfire”) before taking the helm at Microsoft’s Slate, back when Drudge was still folding T-shirts at CBS’s Hollywood gift shop. This goes a long way toward explaining his still, almost monkish manner; anyone who can survive the hot magma of professional blowhards like Novak and company has earned his stillness. But the new Kinsley is almost somnambulistic, as if he has faded into the woodwork of the Pacific Northwest; his appearance was almost spectral in contrast to Drudge’s larger, beef-fed dimensions. Drudge is coming at you with a vengeance. You can still find his fedora-clad head on the Fox News Channel every weekend. (C-Span made him lose the hat.) His syndicated ABC radio show reaches over 100 stations coast to coast, the Drudge Report boasts a million hits a day and it was announced last week that Penguin Putnam was paying him a half a million dollars for his forthcoming autobiography, “Let the Future Begin.” Compared to Kinsley, the 31-year-old gossip monger is the king of all media.

But if Matt Drudge is a happy man, he hides it well. His site was hacked last week by a band of Internet pirates calling themselves the United Loan Gunmen (they also got C-Span, Nasdaq and the NAACP), an insult he seemed obsessed with on his broadcasts over the weekend. The $30 million libel suit brought against him by White House aide Sidney Blumenthal is still pending and he has taken to soliciting Web site visitors to support him in his defense. (Salon contributor David Horowitz is heading up the campaign.) And a full month after the Columbia Journalism Review cited his outing of the Monica Lewinsky affair in 1998 as one of the 10 Key Dates in the Media This Century, the man still feels dissed, especially by those he terms the media elite.

“Washington Journal” broadcasts three call-in numbers, with the labels Liberal, Conservative and Moderate. (I like to think that each has its own hold music, say the Buena Vista Social Club for the liberals, John Philip Sousa for the conservatives and maybe John Tesh for those folks in the middle.) A “liberal” caller opened the show by congratulating Drudge on his success as a gossip columnist. He then added, “Your lack of education shows with your lack of logic,” and Drudge actually seemed to wince. The show’s moderator, Brian Lamb, made reference to Drudge’s lack of college education (contrasting him to Harvard-grad Kinsley) and Drudge has claimed the distinction as a point of pride in the past, telling anyone within earshot, You too can be a member of the press. (It’s easy!) But speaking of the relative success of his radio show he seemed sensitive, at one point calling his host gig “something to fall back on. I’m not as smart as Mr. Kinsley.”

Drudge’s desire to have it both ways — to be both righteous warrior of the common man and the poor put-upon guy whose daddy couldn’t get him into Harvard — permeates everything he does. It’s actually the least attractive thing about him. The outrage the Washington press corps felt at even having to utter his name last year was an enjoyable spectacle for some of us outside the Beltway. Long before anyone knew the names of Lewinsky or Willey, the one-man news clearing house had broken several big media stories (Connie Chung’s ouster at CBS, that evil spawn of two corporations known as MSNBC) and at least one political one (Bob Dole’s choice of Jack Kemp as his running mate). The fact that he had done all this (as he never tires of reminding people) from his $600-a-month apartment in Hollywood with a staff of two seemed almost charming in a Horatio Alger kind of way.

But as Drudge’s fortunes increase (his estimated combined earnings from various deals should exceed $1 million next year) his Columbo routine is wearing thin. Comparing their respective Web sites, Drudge told Kinsley, “You work for the richest man in the world” — leaving it to moderator Lamb to point out that Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner and Steve Case (AOL carries the Drudge Report) were no slouches in the filthy lucre department. (Salon, for the record, was twitted by both, mostly for its gargantuan, bloated, lazy staff. Kinsley sniffed that Salon’s masthead was much larger than Slate’s; Drudge called it “just a big, fat operation.”) Drudge wants to be identified with the little man — “I’m Matt Drudge, keeping an eye on all the rascals,” he said in signing off on Fox this weekend — but wants to be treated like a player.