Military parades are always political theater, but this one was purely a rhetorical game — set up and won by Trump.

"Trump Takes Credit For Cancellation of His Own ‘Ridiculously’ Expensive Military Parade" — Mediate scoffs — but Trump is right. Full credit due. I never thought this military parade was going to happen. Trump lured his antagonists into looking like they were attacking the military and then, in an effort to make him look bad, getting the price jacked up to an atrocious $92 million, which was just the move that he needed them to make to justify cancellation and then to blame them for obstructing what would have been a glorious patriotic display — a display that, as ever, exists only in the mind.

Trump's tweets this morning:

The local politicians who run Washington, D.C. (poorly) know a windfall when they see it. When asked to give us a price for holding a great celebratory military parade, they wanted a number so ridiculously high that I cancelled it. Never let someone hold you up! I will instead...

....attend the big parade already scheduled at Andrews Air Force Base on a different date, & go to the Paris parade, celebrating the end of the War, on November 11th. Maybe we will do something next year in D.C. when the cost comes WAY DOWN. Now we can buy some more jet fighters!

Cost of the parade that never happens, a rock bottom $0. Political reward: priceless.

Whose pants is Donald Trump talking about?

I've been mostly ignoring Donald Trump, but something about the Mediaite headline "Trump Steamrolls NBC Reporter, Takes Shots at Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg" drew me in. Oddly, the post begins with material about how Trump owns a gun, as if the "shots" he was taking at Krauthammer and Goldberg were not merely metaphorical. (Does Trump also own a steamroller?)

And then came Trump’s time to bash all his famous conservative critics.

On Charles Krauthammer, who called him a “rodeo clown”: He’s “a totally overrated person that dislikes me personally. I’ve never met him. He’s a totally overrated guy, doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

On Jonah Goldberg, who compared him to a “failed man”: “I’m worth a fortune. You know, it’s interesting. I went to the best school, got great marks, everything else. I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand. […] Then I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?” [Ed. note: Huh? Does anyone know why Trump would think Goldberg can’t buy pants? Send tips to tips@mediaite.com]

That's hilariously loutish, calling Jonah Goldberg "a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants." I googled trump jonah pants to see if Goldberg had responded, and I got to this headline at The Daily Beast: "Trump Teases Critic for Being Paralyzed":

Not content with insulting a female reporter’s intelligence and professionalism, Donald Trump apparently mocked a conservative critic for being paralyzed. Trump in an interview with NBC News was asked about columnist Charles Krauthammer, who is paralyzed from the waist down and has called Trump a “rodeo clown.” In response to criticism from Krauthammer and National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg, Trump said the following: “I went out, I made a fortune, a big fortune, a tremendous fortune… bigger than people even understand,” he said before discussing his plan to release financial statements. “Then I get called by a guy that can’t buy a pair of pants, I get called names?”

Here's the clip. He's obviously talking about Goldberg, not Krauthammer, when he gets to the pair-of-pants hyperbole.

Even if he had used that figure of speech when talking about Krauthammer, he wouldn't have been teasing Krauthammer for being paralyzed. He'd just have stumbled into an unfortunate image. And, look, Krauthammer has responded, and Krauthammer knows it's Jonah whose pants-buying wherewithal was called into question:

"[Trump is] repeating himself. I'm like Jeb on this. I'm done. The man's specialty [is] to suck oxygen, I'm going to be breathing fresh air... And I do want to make an appeal to the viewers out there to crowdsource, to buy Jonah a pair of pants. I think if you look under the table it's disgraceful the way he comes to the show."

The teasing is coming from Krauthammer, and now Jonah has the exquisite distinction of getting fixed in our heads as an icon of panstlessness.

"Pat Robertson Tells Grieving Mother Her Dead Baby Could’ve Grown Up to Be Hitler."

A headline at Mediaite. What Robertson said — when I woman asked how a good God could have let her 3-year-old child die — was:

As far as God’s concerned, He knows the end from the beginning and He sees a little baby and that little baby could grow up to be Adolf Hitler, he could grow up to be Joseph Stalin, he could grow up to be some serial killer, or he could grow up to die of a hideous disease. God sees all of that, and for that life to be terminated while he’s a baby, he’s going to be with God forever in Heaven so it isn’t a bad thing.

He could have made his theological points more clearly and he could have been gentler to the poor mother, but Mediate goes overboard. For one thing, Robertson didn't say that God took her baby because it "could've grown up to be Hitler." He's circling around some pretty conventional ideas: We can't know why God does what he does — allowing bad people to live and good people to die. And: When little children die, they go to Heaven.

Mediaite goes on question "this logic":

If Robertson’s version of God truly can see what he says He can see, then why didn’t he kill Hitler, Stalin, or all those serial killers while they were children? Did he see them draw a pretty picture or save a puppy from a fire and then assume that they wouldn’t [would've?] go on to become evil, so He spared them? Because that’s seems a bit short of seeing “the end from the beginning.”

That's just atheist talk, essentially mocking (or failing to understand) the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God.

Biden "will surely take it to Ryan on... his statement yesterday that inner-city kids need to be taught 'good discipline' and 'character.'"

Writes John Cassidy, in The New Yorker, observing that tonight's VP debate is high stakes.

Cassidy doesn't link to the Ryan statement, which — I found on my own — is part of the video that made the rounds the other day, the one that supposedly showed Ryan being "testy." (We talked about it here.) Anyway, let me put the "good discipline" and "character" remark in context. Ryan was asked the question "Does the country have a gun problem?" Ryan took the position that the problem is crime, not guns, and that we already have enough "good, strong gun laws," which we ought to enforce better.

But the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity to the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society, that's what charities and civic groups and churches do to help one another, make sure they realize the value in one another.

Let's try to understand why people like Cassidy think that's outrageous (as opposed to platitudinous).  Here's Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

"Herman Cain Tells Piers Morgan That He Is Anti-Abortion, Yet Pro-Choice?"

Mediate has that headline, as if it's hard to fathom. But I think most Americans are anti-abortion yet pro-choice. I am.

As I view the clip at the link — and it cuts off just at the point where I'd ask a few more questions — Herman Cain believes abortion should be legal. He can maintain his own opinion that abortion is always wrong and, at the same time, that it is the woman's decision and that it is not the role of government to intervene.

In the clip, he says the same thing about homosexuality. He thinks that it's wrong, and also that it's not the government's role to prevent anyone from choosing to engage in homosexual behavior. Piers Morgan drags him into the question whether homosexuality is inborn, and the 2 men never draw the distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual behavior. Whether it's inborn or not, there's a choice about acting out on your desires, and since Cain — I think! — sees that choice as belonging to the individual and not to the government, the science question about the origin of homosexual orientation is irrelevant. I love the idea of freedom of choice, based on a commitment to freedom, as opposed to a concession to the hard facts of biology. (And I remember when people who supported gay rights were enthusiastic about sexual orientation as a choice and got quite angry at a scientist who studied sexual orientation at the biological level.)

What's missing from that Mediaite clip — perhaps not from the interview as a whole — is whether Cain wants to see the Supreme Court overrule the cases that find constitutional rights to choose abortion and to choose to engage in homosexual behavior. You can't tell from the statement in the clip that he thinks there are rights that preclude legislation. Cain might be saying that he wouldn't sign legislation depriving the individual of those choices, but that his disapproval of that legislation doesn't mean that there is a constitutional right — which is what his favorite Supreme Court justice says about such things.