Did you know it’s entirely possible to drink a whole bottle of vodka a day with no hangover or other ill effects if you use milk as a mixer? I did it the last week of the campaign. I don’t know what size the bottles were because I don’t understand these new foreign measurements they use now, but they were whole bottles and I polished them off. My doctor was alarmed. “Don’t worry,” I said, “it was skim milk.”

I wish I had invented this highball earlier to help me through the more surreal aspects of the late fall coverage. The craziest moment came during a Palin rally when the camera found a sweet little old lady, who looked like a housemother back when girls’ dorms still had them, holding up a sign that read, “I Support Unwed Mothers.” Some 50 years ago she might have been one of those beauty-contest winners who solemnly announced, “I’m for world peace and mental retardation.” For a frightening moment I lost all track of time.

I also lost track of Joe Lieberman. Was he a Democrat turned Republican, or the other way around? My mind kept going on three-second delay. Once I caught myself staring bemused at the TV, wondering why he was at the wrong rally. Not that it would matter much; all you have to do is point him in the direction you want him to go and squeeze him, and he’ll ooze on over. It’s easy to lose track of him because he defies the iron Law of Possibility: The only difference between toothpaste and Joe Lieberman is that you can put him back in the tube.

For a flying leap into surrealism, try the colors that now represent the two political parties on electoral maps. Whoever heard of red standing for conservatives and blue for liberals? It should be the other way around. The Jacobins and the Bolsheviks both traded blue for red; the fleur-de-lys on a blue field became the tricolor, while the powdery blue of czarist trappings became a solid red field sporting a hammer and sickle. After all, blue is the color of veins when they are all in one piece, and red is the color of veins sliced open by bloodthirsty revolutionists.

That our brave new maps were cooked up by liberals goes without saying. Somebody out there wants to train the electorate to think red is short for “redneck” and blue rhymes with “true.” Or maybe the guardians of political correctness see the new maps as an oblique way of raising the specter of neo-McCarthyism to keep “red” from becoming a synonym for liberal. They at least see through the game, but more worrisome are the liberals to whom the maps actually make sense. These are the far-lefties who hurl charges of “Nazi!” and “Hitler!” at any conservative who opens his mouth. College-educated cretins stuffed full of “relevant” courses, they are so ignorant and unlettered that they never met a fleur-de-lys or a czar they could identify. Hitler is the only bad guy they’ve ever heard of, and they think the only red flag in history is the one with the swastika on it.

The color switch started a few elections ago, but this time it really got to me in a physiological way: I am right-handed, and every time I tried to do a rapid scan of an electoral map I felt as if I were trying to write with my left hand. In earlier times, children forced to do this had nervous breakdowns. If you doubt that it’s possible to create a nation of febrile voters trained to zig when they want to zag, try writing with your “other” hand and see how long it takes your stomach to knot up and start shaking.

Surreal, surrealer, surrealest. The commercial breaks took the cake.

The ambulance chaser recruiting for class action: “If you or a loved one died from using this product, call me!”

The three-year-old vomiting stock trader crowing in a deep baritone: “I just bought stock! You just saw me buy stock! There’s nothing to it! Anybody can — ARRRGGHHH.”

Believe it or not, I had some thoughts on the issues along the way. Gay marriage was the easiest to dispense with because I am neither a Republican nor a conservative. I am a reactionary, thus I am against tinkering with a good old-fashioned perversion.

While the never-ending debate over abortion is wearing me down, I take a stringent position on babies who survive abortion. Not because of religion — I have none — but because I’m a stickler for fair play. Abortionists should take their cue from hangings in the Old West: If the rope broke, the accused went free. Any abortionist who does not make every effort to save a surviving baby should be charged with second-degree murder.

What intrigued me most was the snarling contempt and hysterical loathing of Sarah Palin by both liberals and some conservatives. I think I’ve figured it out.

Winston Churchill once observed: “If a woman has ‘It,’ she doesn’t need anything else; but if she doesn’t have ‘It,’ it doesn’t matter what else she has.” This sets up an either/or that people can grasp, but put them together and you overload the circuits. Palin’s problem is that she combined a too-muchness with a not-enoughness and ended up personifying Emily Dickinson’s lines about “a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons — / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.” A disturbing contradiction, an unbearable contrast, that took the form of wholesome sex appeal, family-values oomph, and dropping g’s instead of panties.

But far be it from me to criticize a woman most conservatives adore, so I’ll just say that I think it would be altogether fitting and proper for Palin to run for president in 2012, the centennial of the Titanic.