California Conservative

Yes, you read that right. Joe Kennedy II has written an op-ed in today’s NY Daily News where he attempts to rationalize the deal made with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Here’s how he attempts to justify doing business with the Western Hemisphere’s biggest terrorist supporter:

When the oil industry profits hit a record annual high of more than $100 billion, we wrote every OPEC nation asking for some assistance to alleviate the huge burden of energy prices on the poor. We wrote to every single major oil company as well.

And every single one turned us down.

Every one, that is, except Venezuela and CITGO Petroleum.

So, in 2005, we began a partnership with CITGO, an oil company owned by the people and the government of Venezuela, to distribute heating oil. The program went smoothly. Tens of thousands of households were served without any particular controversy.

This year was another story. Our program attracted negative attention this season for only one reason: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s controversial speech at the United Nations last September. A lot of people didn’t like Chavez’s speech. I didn’t like his remarks, either.

That speech led critics to suggest that the oil program to help the needy is somehow un-American.

How is aiding those less fortunate un-American? It is only un-American to hypocrites who criticize a program that helps the poor, but are perfectly happy to drive their cars, fill their boats, fly their planes and heat their homes using Venezuelan oil. If the oil isn’t good enough for the poor, it shouldn’t be good enough for them.

Joe Kennedy is missing the point by making this rationalization. The same week that he writes an op-ed explaining why we need to make deals with the most notorious South American thug, we also learned that the Democratic House wants to take ANWR off-limits forever. The bill’s author is Ed Markey, (D-MA). ANWR has one of the biggest natural gas fields in the world.

Let’s frame this issue a different way: Joe Kennedy thinks that we should buy heating oil from a thug who is Iran’s best friend rather than touch the pristine beauty of ANWR. The only bad part is that the section of ANWR where the drilling would happen is neither pristine nor beautiful, though it is wilderness.

What makes this worse is that this deal gives Venezuela a substantial injection of cash, cash that it can now use to prop up Iran’s failing economy right when we’re trying to squeeze Iran with sanctions.

It’s rather disgusting that Kennedy would play this type of game, saying that they were just interested in helping the poor. Shame on him for that. If they weren’t so opposed to drilling in a section of land that’s seen only a handful of visitors other than the oilmen that drill there, we could have abundant natural gas at a cheap price without having to deal with thug dictators like Chavez.

What it really comes down to is that Kennedy’s fine with dealing with a tyrant but he’s vehemently opposed to giving American oil companies the tools they need to maintain a steady supply of oil for the poor that Kennedy’s so worried about. We wouldn’t have these problems if Kennedy’s environmental extremist allies weren’t so bent on preserving wilderness as they were with supplying everyone’s basic needs.

Unfortunately for the average working person, these environmental extremists worship at the altar of Mother Nature while making deals with the devil instead of looking out for the average working stiff.

It’s also disingenuous for Kennedy to say that CITGO is owned “by the people and the Venezuelan government.” Venezuela is a socialist state, meaning that the government gets first dibs on revenue while giving to the rest of the country a pittance after the government has lined their pockets.

Now, thanks to CITGO, more than 100,000 New Yorkers will not be ignored this season, and 25 million gallons of low-cost heating oil will help them stay a little warmer.

This assistance comes at a time when our government has cut the federal fuel assistance budget by a third and resisted collecting royalties from oil companies making huge profits from drilling on public land, funds that should be used, along with windfall tax revenues from energy companies, to offset the burden of higher energy prices on the poor.

All this rationalizing wouldn’t be needed if Democrats didn’t make public lands off-limits for drilling. This is typical liberalism. They create a crisis because they’re beholden to extremist groups like the environmental extremists, then ’solve’ the crisis they created by making deals with tyrants and dictators.

Frankly, I don’t know how much more of this type of ‘help’ America can afford.

Technorati Tags: Hugo Chavez, Joe Kennedy, Ahmadinejad, ANWR, Environmental Extremists, Ed Markey, Bill Delahunt, Energy

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Corruption, Domestic Policies, Foreign Policy, Humanitarian, Liberals, South America, Subversives, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.