“Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15,” ran the obituary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch two days later, reflecting a prevalent mood in the country regarding the choices this fall.

We feel her pain. To some, it resembles the Iraq-Iran war, in which most people longed to see both sides defeated. To others, it evokes the day in World War II when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, turning a collaboration between the two worst regimes that had ever existed into a battle of bad against worse.