Focusing the Chutzpah

I just saw that the D-Day blog has its own post about the target of this week's Chutzpah award. What I found interesting, however, was that this account was a follow-up to an earlier post that may indicate a pattern of economic skullduggery at the expense of our armed forces. Here is the topic of the prior post:

The Bush administration is threatening that it will issue furlough notices to up to 150,000 civilian workers at military bases in mid-December if Congress does not approve unrestricted Iraq funding immediately. As part of this campaign, the Pentagon is distributing a document warning that the Army may cease to function if it does not receive the funds now. (View the document here.)

Perhaps I was too generous in the breadth of the award. Rather than distribute it over the entire Executive Branch, why not just aim it directly at the Commander in Chief, who seems to have decided that nothing, whether it is respect for our troops or recognition of their support structure, will stand in the way of his getting what he wants. In other words our President seems to have discovered how effective hostage-taking can be as an act of terrorism; so he has decided to apply terrorist strategies to get the Congress to submit to his will. For those keeping score this would put our President's "Chutzpah Count" up to five (and it seems like only yesterday that a friend asked me over drinks why I had not yet given Bush any awards)!