I read with some interest the dozens of posts about Kos's teeth post. I was quite literally shocked when I saw them.
Kos's piece was the product of some effort and deliberation on his part. He wrote the thing, produced pictures, even fired up Photoshop, got out that ink dropper tool and carefully picked pixel after pixel, judiciously eyeballing each one to find the single most unattactive shade of dingy yellow present in the McCain website's graphic (all told, I suspect that process took nearly fifteen minutes of his careful attention). My point in saying this is: How can you be surprised or shocked? This is who Markos is.
Why do people come here? Some come for the front page and the recommended diary sections. Some just the recommended diaries (that's me). Some to post their thoughts on the issues of the day (to the extent that their thoughts on those actually fit within the realm of acceptable opinion) and to read the same thoughts posted by like-minded individuals. Still others to post pictures of lolcats, comments with laden with words like "Bushit" and "rethuglican"... I would say this last category is the primary driving force behind the meteoric rise of Daily Kos.
Kos taps into a primal desire to hurt the opposition. It is by channeling this drive amongst the churning masses of bloggers and forum goers that he has built this place. The tone is merciless and amoral, though it certainly does contain an element of moral posturing to crudely disguise the underlying conviction that the ends justify the means in politics (and of course the barely concealed admiration for the tactics of the Roves and Norquists of the right -- or at least the desire to replicate them in a way that would not shock the progressive conscience, narrowly defined).
I submit to the reader that everyone here knows this, though they may passionately deny it. Sometimes it comes out in a way so pointless and petty that it can't help but trip the spider sense of those with some shred of decency and there's an outcry, but the truth is, this stuff is par for the course on Daily Kos. Indeed, it is what defines Daily Kos. Other liberal blogs offer far better analysis and much more interesting commenting communities, but those wonkier blogs tend to have that extra degree of scruple in handling the opposition that fails to draw a crowd quite like the Big Orange.
In short, you know what you're getting into when you come here and Kos owes you no apology for what he does. If you think talking about McCain's teeth, even if they're fake and the reason is they were broken off at the gum by some Vietnamese prison guard, is out of bounds on dKos, you're simply lying to yourself. This stuff is why you're here.