YOU'LL NEED IT

"Hank, why do you drink?
Hank, why do you roll smoke?
Why must you live out the songs that you wrote?" Song: Family Tradition, by Hank Williams, Jr

The singer songwriter Hank Williams Jr, wasn't just making that lyric up 35 years ago; he was being honest about his often turbulent life in the chemically enhanced fast lane living in the shadow of his legendary singer songwriter father Hank Williams Sr.

Due to his lifelong love of the high life, Williams Jr. may be one of the least qualified persons in the country to be trotted out to expound on politics; but there he was on Fox & Friends the other morning. The first glimpse of ol' Hank, casually dressed in baseball cap, sunglasses and arms folded, prompted Brian Kilmeade to remark, "Your body language says, 'Leave me alone'". When asked where he was, Hank replied he was in his little Nashville studio but added, "I'd rather be there looking at Gretchen".

That was the classy part. Williams proceeded to compare President Obama to Hitler, and called Obama and Vice President Joe Biden the "enemy" and the "Three Stooges", somehow being unable to comprehend the number three. The most charitable assessment of Williams appearance was that it was incoherent; but it's fair to say it was also hateful, disrespectful and utterly without redeeming content. Gretchen Carlson was even compelled to disavow Williams' Obama - Hitler comparison after the interview was mercifully ended.

Up in that Great Newsroom in the Sky, Edward R. Morrow, who brought unequaled decency and honesty and serious discourse to a news starved nation in the first decade of TV news, has modified his famous signoff thusly: "Good night and good luck....you'll need it."

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.

AT LEAST NO 20 YEAR WAIT

Compared to convicted cop killer Troy Davis, who was dispatched by state sponsored homicide September 21, radical Muslim cleric and US Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki got off pretty easy. Davis had to stew on Death Row for 20 years while the wheels of justice creaked to their inevitable conclusion, in accordance with due process, so that, yes, Mr. Davis was worthy of being murdered by the State.

But when it comes to justice for "suspected" terrorists, even US citizens, the Obama Administration created American justice 21st century style precisely to avoid the inconvenience of an indictment, a trial, and then ten to twenty years of appeals. Al-Awlaki was simply put on the Administration "hit list" and in two short years we located his whereabouts and dispatched an unmanned drone to blast him painlessly to smithereens.

Troy Davis may have received due process, getting a fair trial in which nine folks fingered him for the killing and getting 20 years of additional life for appeals, but in the end it appears he was still railroaded to the Lethal Injection House for a crime we now know he may not have committed. That kind of due process might have proven al-Awlaki guilty of nothing more than anti American rhetoric and simply could not have been tolerated.

Due process? Justice? That is so old fashioned. Besides, this is God's shining city on the hill......where we don't need no stinkin' justice.