So I have a little script I wish to run once a week.  It will check on some variable and if its set, it continues running the script, if not, I want it to wait an hour and try again.  If it's still not set, it'll wait 2 hours, then 4, and then give up for the week.  My question is, can I do this in python?  Seems like I'd have to create and delete cron jobs in python to get this to work.
You can't really set standard crons directly from Python. Instead, I'd set the cron to fire every hour, and in the code determine if it needs to run again (ie last successful execution is more than 7 days ago).
Creating and deleting cron jobs in python