“When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics,” wrote Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel.

On Amazon and other websites that apolitically trade in political books, reason and unreason come into contact as books and as readers. It is inevitable that when books by Gingrich and Obama rub shoulders on virtual shelves and books by David Horowitz and Barbara Ehrenreich are separated by only the thinnest of digital spaces; that reason and unreason should collide in their reviews sections.

The left has never dealt well with dissent. Without a grip on power, it loses its grip on sanity. If it can’t hold on to the high ground of power, then all it has left is its rage. Seeing the wrong species of political book listed in Amazon’s book recommendations feature is often enough to induce a typing tempest or a rage blackout. Or both.

In his Washington Post column, “The Rage of Reason”, Eugene Robinson wrote that “Bush Derangement Syndrome is now a full-blown epidemic”… which has reduced its sufferers “to frustrated, sputtering rage.” But there’s nothing reasonable about rage, particularly the “frustrated sputtering rage” that can be spotted in the Amazon book reviews of the left where it has become the stripes and glossy markings of a frustrated progressive species.

“Yes, the leading advocate of war, racism, predatory capitalism, and narrow minded selfishness has done it again,” reads one rage blackout review of David Horowitz’s book, “A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next”.

“He sat down with his set of crayons and scribbled some superstitious irrational rantings sure to whip his dwindling minions of drooling fans into a frenzy of self justifying ecstacy. Lioke all advocates of irrational anti-scientific nonesense, there is no reasoning with bthem of course, which is why reviews of this supposed “book” (aren’t there laws about truth in advertising) will tend to be 5 stars by his loyal fans and one star to zero for other reasonable people. Intellectual masturbation by an impotent clown, albeit one who is not funny in the slightest, since his advocacy of reactionary neo–fascist theories have tragic consequences fior real people, like the poor, minorities, the elderly, the sick, and people everywhere in the Third World whose families are blown to bits in the unjust wars that Horowitz serves as the cheerleader for.”

The reviewer who elsewhere claimed that Bush was worse than Hitler, and that the Stars and Stripes replaced the Swastika as “the symbol of tyranny and death on six continents” (apparently that includes Antarctica) showed no sign of having actually read the book he was reviewing or of even being able to read. Misspelled, filled with incoherent rage against a man whom he had never met and whose identity he seemed only tangentially aware of, this was another tirade by the poisoned soul of the incoherent left venting its collective fury against the books that do not accord with its views.

You don’t have to spend too much time walking through the woods to step in poison ivy and you don’t have to spend too much time browsing Amazon.com to find more members of the same addled species who substitute ideology for humanity.

“Did He clarify that he is a Jewish Zionist? “Deception” is what the Zionists believe in to achieve their goal,” one J. Ezzo whispers poisonously on a copy of “Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey”.

On “Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey”, another sneers: “It’s definitively a book for right wingers as they can not understand words with more than 7 letters . The author extrapolates his experiences into the wider world of wich he has no knowledge.”

The spelling as always is left intact as a tribute to a rage that transcends the boundaries of conventional grammar.

They show up in the review sections of books by Mark Steyn, Wafa Sultan, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and dozens of others. Rarely do they admit to having actually read the books they are reviewing. Occasionally they will mention that they borrowed them, read them in a library while wearing plastic gloves or stole them. Often they barely seem to know who the author is. Only that the author is one of “Them.”

The “Them” are the people that they have been conditioned to hate as part of their identity and as the source of their unreason.

“DANGEROUS, DESTRUCTIVE BOOK!!!!!” shrieks a review of Glenn Beck’s “The Original Argument.” “Mostly filled with lies hate,” clamors another review in an unintentionally accurate self-analysis.

“THE FACT SHE CAN WRITE THIS BOOK AFTER THE DIASTERUS BUSH CHANEY YEARS & NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT WHAT THE REPUBLICONS IN THE HOUSE & THE REPUBLICON GOVERNERS ARE DOING TO THIS COUNTRY TODAY (DESTROYING THE INFRASTRUCTURE) REQUIRES A LOT OF GAUL,” a review of Ann Coulter’s “Demonic” thunderously blares.

The left likes to accuse talk radio of being the source of division, anger and hate in the country, while pretending that they don’t inculcate hate into their own followers. Reviews like these however reveal that the underside of the left is as dank, illiterate and filled with hate as its pundits claim the right is.

The electrical shock between reason and unreason that sparks these Frankensteins of the left to life takes place on Amazon.com, where you don’t need to buy a book to review it and a single wrong click can take you out of the territory of unreason and into the territory of reason. It happens when a radio dial slips too far to the right or a member of the collective bubble of progressive ideas encounters an article that challenges his or her preconceptions. Sometimes the response is an inclination to reason, but more often it is a surrender to rage.

Rage has been the longtime mistress of the left, the furnace of its revolutions, the volcanic fuel of its hunger for power and the heart of the unreasoning beast of its political ego that cannot abide any path other than its own. “Demonic” fits it well.