While the guy sounds like he's a nice guy in person, there are several things in this essay (via James Taranto) which I find deeply disturbing.

The first is a lie-based echo chamber effect:

There was another reason, though, why hundreds of thousands of liberals around the country found themselves addictively checking and rechecking Daily Kos as the 2004 election approached. It made them think Democrats were going to win. Moulitsas wasn't just posting any polls, he was selecting those that suggested Democrats--from John Kerry[*] to congressional candidates--were heading for victory, while downplaying less encouraging signs. It left liberals trapped in a bubble of reassurance. Heading into the election, it would have been reasonable to assume from the evidence presented on Daily Kos that Kerry was the clear favorite to beat Bush, and that Democrats were likely to pick up seats in both houses of Congress. When none of these things happened, there was a sense of incomprehension. All of Kos's confident predictions had been wrong. "It's a valid criticism. Looking back, I was too optimistic," Moulitsas told me. "[At] the beginning, I didn't even know what a margin of error was."

Yeah, well, it's only funny until someone loses an eye. The MSM produced a similar effect by oversampling Democrats in opinion polls before the election, and relying on clearly skewed exit polls to predict the final results.

But the net result is not very funny at all: millions of lefties, unable to comprehend that Moulitsas "didn't know even know what a margin of error was", or that the media might have a kind of bias which leads to dishonesty and manipulation, concluded instead that the only possible explanation was the election was stolen.

I have met these people, and know that they are very, very angry. Not angry that Kos misled them: no, that's impossible. Not angry that the media lied to them and got their hopes up when Kerry was, objectively, still down in reliable polls. Not angry that they were played like a violin. No, that could never happen.

So, in their minds, this country has become Nazi Germany, Bush is Hitler, and people like me, who thought Bush was flawed but less flawed than Kerry, are election-stealing Nazis or part of Hitler's mezmerized minions. And hey, when you're fighting Nazis, anything goes, right?

And this is why these people are so bloody dangerous. I don't hate them, but having a large number of angry deluded people is very, very bad for our Republic.

Second point: a desire for sheer, raw power:

After he graduated, he took another degree, from Boston University's law school, and then, in 1998, moved out to San Francisco to try his luck in Silicon Valley. A couple of years later, now married, he moved again, to Berkeley, exasperated at the realization that he wasn't going to make a fortune in the high-tech boom. “Maybe at some time, Silicon Valley really was this democratic ideal where the guy with the best idea made a billion dollars, but by the time I got there at least, it was just like anything else—a bunch of rich kids who knew each other running around and it all depended on who you knew,” Moulitsas told me. Unemployed, Moulitsas, started posting comments on a site called MyDD.com, the most insidery of the emerging liberal blogs....

What he's after isn't fame but power—and not any old power, but the kind of Silicon Valley-derived sense of power that holds that only the people who know how to program code can ever really run things. “All he really wants is not to be president, or governor, or have statues built for him,” one of his friends told me, “but maybe to help run the DCCC, to help Democrats win, and to have been right.”

Unable to break into the power establishment in Silicon Valley, resenting the "rich kids" who do hold the power there and keep him from accuring corporate power and wealth, Moulitsas then turns that lust towards gaining political power.

Here's a good rule to live by: The people you should least trust with power are those who want it most. And, as Keith Jackson notes:

I've said many times in this blog that there's a difference between the Left and the Right when it comes to power. The Left is nothing without power. The Right can survive and even flourish without power. The aim of the Left is to engineer society in accordance with a blueprint. To do this, it must have power, including presidential power. The aim of the Right is not to engineer anything; it is to conserve valuable institutions, practices, traditions, and ways of life. It can do this without a president, and often with only a minority of legislators. I think this difference in attitude toward power explains the animosity emanating from the Left. Leftists are impotent, frustrated, angry, and resentful. They act like petulant children. Rightists act like responsible adults. Do you trust leftists to protect you and your family from domestic criminals and international terrorists? Do you trust leftists to be responsible custodians of government? Do you trust leftists to conserve valuable institutions such as marriage?