Daily Kos appears to be a website which occasionally suffers mood swings of one flavor or another. Sometimes these mood swings are prompted by an event, sometimes they aren't. I think many of these moods are held by people, but don't normally surface until some sort of critical mass is reached.
One of these mood swings appears to be a very strong anti-moderate, anti-centrist attitude that is created, mostly, by a plethora of diaries by members, but occasionally inflamed by the front pagers as well.
It appears that the closer we get to the Connecticut primary, the more inflamed these attitudes have become, and the release of the DLC's domestic plan for 2006 doesn't' seem to be helping things either.
With the Lieberman situation, you appear to have a steadily increasing beating of the drums to throw under the bus anyone who even has the thought of supporting Lieberman - even in the primary - remotely near their thoughts. This is to say nothing about someone who may endorse them in the primary, or even, god forbid, campaign for them.
There have been diaries which have basically said that we should throw people like Bill Clinton and Barbara Boxer (kos even jumped in on Boxer, and I wouldn't even describe her as a moderate!) under the bus.
I've been a supporter of Lamont up until this point, but like Hackett supporters before them, many people in the Lamont support gang have progressed from being enthusiastic to being downright annoying and nasty. Anyone who dare oppose their goal of booting Lieberman shall be tossed off the Empire State Building. Recently I've almost started to believe that I want Lieberman to win the primary, just to shut the Lamont people up. It has almost certainly caused me not to send him more money.
The second event that has caused the "centrists/moderates are evil" attitudes to flame out is the unveiling of the DLC's domestic agenda. Now, I am hardly a fan of the DLC, and I don't agree with them when it comes to the war. However, I agree with them more times than not when it comes to economic and social policy.
So the DLC plan comes out and says that we should attempt to allow more people the chance to go to college. It slams Bush over his "misguided economic philosophy." They say that wasteful corporate subsidies should be cut. They say to go back to pay-as-you-go. They support research into alterative energy as a way to solve the nation's energy problems. They want to "shine a light" on CEO salaries. And so on.
If any other group had published a paper like the DLC did, people would be ranting and raving about the good ideas in it. However, since the DLC published it, it is automatically condemned and thrown away. For the single reason that the DLC did it. People read through it, and since they can't find anything to criticize inside the document, they are forced to criticize the document for what's not in it. This issue wasn't mentioned. That issue wasn't mentioned. I'm sure that if they mentioned every issue that I've seen brought up, people would still find other obscure issues which prove that the DLC somehow doesn't get it.
One of the chief complaints against the DLC (and Lieberman) is that they needlessly attack democrats. Meanwhile, some of the most vitriolic political attacks I have seen outside of the far right wing have been targeted towards moderate and centrist democrats, not originating from them.
When the DLC says something rather common sense like "we shouldn't get into a shouting match," it appears that many people decide to take that as some form of personal attack. Of course, immediately following that show of being of offended is typically a comment about how the DLC "takes it up the ass" or a similar statement - something which really could be taken as a personal attack.
We see it elsewhere. Any moderate democrat that does anything the left doesn't right is automatically accused of being DLC (and therefore bad). I've seen many people interchange moderate, centrist, and DLC as if they are synonyms (and by extension, that moderates and centrists are bad). Of course some people don't even bother with the innuendo and just flat out say that moderates and centrists are bad.
I don't think most moderates and centrists want a battle for the "heart and soul" of the party. They're not longing to beat down the left wing so they can keep their imaginary checks from the corporations (damn! where did I put that check from MBNA?) However, the more aggressive the left wing pushes against moderates and centrists, don't be shocked if they fight back.