NOW...THAAAT'S CHUTZPAH

Chutzpah is the commonly used Yiddish word to describe someone who has overstepped the boundaries of accepted behavior with no shame.

If we were nominating folks for Chutzpah of the Year Award, my choice is former Vice President Dick Cheney. On the stump hawking his VP memoir In My Time, Cheney is demanding President Obama apologize to him for 2008 campaign remarks criticizing Cheney for "over reacting to the 911 attacks". Cheney's suggestion was prompted by Obama's assassination, without indictment, of American Muslim cleric and suspected terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. Somehow, in Cheney's twisted moral world, Obama's utterly illegal and immoral wrong somehow justifies Cheney's eight years of orchestrating endless criminal war and instituting policies of torture which will brand him forever as a war criminal.

Cheney's chutzpah however, is his convenient forgetting that one of Obama's first crucial decisions as President was to officially announce that there were be no investigation of Bush Administration war crimes, with the astounding comment, "We need to look forward and not backward." Mr. Cheney is not satisfied with being allowed to roam free, in America at least, instead of stewing in a prison cell, due to the undeserved magnanimity of the President. But that is not good enough for Cheney. Now, only an apology will make him happy.

Now, thaaaat's chutzpah.