There are days, as the late Molly Ivins once observed, when “ . . . you open the paper and it’s kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator, smoking a cigar. Hard to know what to think . . .”

So when I read in passing, on several different news aggregate and opinion blogs, of a complete unknown, who apparently did not campaign in any detectable manner – winning the South Carolina Democratic Party primary, I am having one of those moments of elemental WTF?

Blondie assures me that South Carolina is a very odd place, though (having served at a tour at Cherry Point) so perhaps enough of it slops over – and what little I do know about their peculiar variety of local political shenanigans should not surprise me at all . . . but still. Unemployed Army veteran, living with the aged parents, and having achieved almost total invisibility on the campaign trail, and seeming to be peculiarly in-adept at fielding the press and uncomfortable with the public, of less than dazzling verbal skills . . . yeah, all the way to Texas I smell a rat, and a rat the size of a brontosaurus.

But still – 60% of the vote . . . even listed first, alphabetically, on the ballot, and lord only knows how many addled voters might have been thinking along ecologically-correct lines, as in a suggestion to “go green(e)” . . . that so many were willing to vote for a complete and total unknown, over someone which they might have at least been expected to have heard of, to go against the Republican nominee, Jim deMint. My semi-scientific wild ass guess on that (and I am opining from a distance, mind you) is that whoever is responsible for setting up Alvin Greene as a post turtle might have been able to manufacture a handful votes for a plant . . . but inducing so many voters not in on the joke to go along? That goes beyond random, methinks – that goes all the way to a perfectly stunning degree of unhappiness with establishment politicians, or even those who had at least a shred of credibility and exposure as a politician.

In other words, how pissed off is the general voting public in South Carolina with their elected nabobs that they would just “x” the unknown name on the ballot? William F. Buckley once famously opined that he would “ . . . rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

So, maybe voters in South Carolina have done just that? Discuss.