Over the last few days, especially as the South Carolina primary neared, I've had the increasingly disorienting feeling that, like Alice, I've fallen through a hole and landed in a political world I can't comprehend.  All the usual people and physical features are there – two political parties; their presidential candidates; commentators; news analysts; hyper-partisans; a public divided as usual among the politically indifferent, the grossly ignorant but passionately committed, and a thin stratum of the attentive and informed.

But nothing and no one are in the right place, and everyone is saying the wrong things.  American politics has finally descended into bedlam, driven there at last by a Republican elite that thought it could forever ignore and defy its voters without consequence, and by a Democratic elite that thought this time those rubes will love The Queen of the Night. 

Among Republicans, the right commentators cheer the left candidates, while the left candidates claim to be the right, and the unclassifiable claims to be the savior.  The last is loved by no one among the party's graybeards – all he has are the voters, but among them only a steady plurality.

As a conservative, I desperately want someone – yes, I will say it: anyone – from this group to be sitting at the big desk after January 20, 2017.  Yes, I have preferences, but none of them would bring the other party's demented crowd of America-despising civilizational destroyers to Washington.

But whom to choose to win?

There are many who will tell you they know who has the best chance of winning.  Beware those claiming such knowledge – they will lie to you about other things.  

In the Democratic Party, the second-time-around heiress replays her nightmare of 2008: denied the crown then by a usurper, she faces the real possibility of a second and this time terminal rejection.  How many times can a woman live through this without going mad?  If she were even slightly less odious, I would feel sorry for her. 

Again mercilessly harassed from her left, again rejected by her party's young, again met by her should-be supporters with emotions ranging from indifference to disgust.  And – most humiliating of all – in this iteration of the nightmare, her tormentor is not a young black man, but an old white man.

In a political party whose core belief is that old white men are the root of all evil, is it not the ultimate rejection to be unable to brush aside a member of this demographic?  Can a human being's psyche live through this? 

But again, whom do we who want, we who want this party to lose?  Beware those claiming such knowledge – they will lie to you about other things.

We wished for Obama in 2008 rather than The Queen of the Night, because America would never elect a man so far left.  Right.  But surely, today America would never elect a lifelong Marxist.  Right.

Socialism sounds great – if you have no experience of life and know no history.  So, unsurprisingly, in an eerie reprise of 2008, the old Marxist's most ardent supporters are the under-30s, blissfully unaware that about 2.5 billion people lived under Bernie's principles for about 30 to 70 years (counting the Chinese), then woke up one morning and threw the whole system out because it produced nothing but poverty and misery.

Shout-out to millennials: Bernie's brew is not new.  (Rather catchy, that.)  It sounds new to you only because no one taught you anything, and you're too young to have experienced much.  Sex, videogames, and a P.C. undergraduate curriculum don't count.  But good luck selling that wisdom to the kids this fall.

So we don't know whom our guys should nominate to win, and we don't know which opponent to wish for for them to lose. 

Other than that, in this political Wonderland, everything is perfectly clear.