Thursday night's random sampling

Michael Gerson: "The main reason Obama has escaped the political consequences of his poor judgment on the surge has been the success of the surge itself, which has taken the issue almost entirely off the table. ... So Obama is left with a pleasing paradox: The successes of a strategy he opposed may have paved his way to the presidency. And McCain is left with a poignant comfort: He once said he would rather lose an election than lose a war. He may lose an election, in part, because he helped win a war."

Jon Stewart: "How do you spend $150,000 on clothes in two months? What, do you buy the original 'Thriller' jacket off eBay?"

On Monday, David Brooks christened the new swing voter "Patio Man." He says Patio Man has gravitated from the Reagan GOP to softening on the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, to a vote for Bush at the height of the disaster in Iraq in 2004, to an uncertain outlook in 2008. "There is a deep distrust of bourgeois culture running through American suburbia. It is not right wing, but it is conservative: a distrust of those far away; a belief in convention and respectability; and a strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order. ... Patio Man wants change. But this is no time for more risk and more debt. Debt in the future is no solution to the debt racked up in the past. This is a back-to-basics moment, a return to safety and the fundamentals."

Speaking of the those on the payroll of the gray lady, Robert Draper has a fascinating multi-part article in this Sunday's Times Magazine on the McCain campaign's many reinventions from spring to summer to fall, which is available somewhere on the Times' website. It's highly recommended. 

And finally, in case this site is branded anti-liberal: The Commish plans to cross party lines and vote for Jay Nixon, Missouri's fantastic and well-respected attorney general, in the gubernatorial race against Rep. Kenny Hulshof. As his formal study of the law mercifully crashes to a close and private practice beckons, the potential repeal of the utterly disastrous (not to mention unconstitutional) tort reform doctrine is enticing.