Offers of free heating oil from his kind aren't as heart- or home-warming as they sound.
It's hard to blame low-income Americans for trying to find help heating their homes. Some recipients have even been recruited for free trips to Venezuela to learn about the virtues of the socialist revolution there and are being encouraged to spread them back here. As for Teddy Kennedy's nephew Joe, he has obviously been recruited, but I don't think he's shilling for Chvez to keep the Hyannisport mansion warm.
Joe's pitch to the poor fails to mention the production limits Chvez and his pals at the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel, or OPEC, use to keep prices artificially high. I guess when Chvez and Ahmadinejad say they are willing to use oil as a weapon to destroy the Great Satan, this is part of what they had in mind.
Sadly, our energy policy is providing ammunition for their weapons.
It's been two years since President Bush admitted we are "addicted to oil." This expensive addiction has taken a toll on our economy while funding major sponsors of the jihadis and other terrorists that seek to harm us.
We have been told the only way to break this addiction is to reduce consumption, as in the recently passed mandate to increase fuel efficiency. I am all for conservation and improving fuel economy, as with hybrid cars, but even if everyone drove a hybrid it would just slow the rate of growth in our consumption of oil. Those savings will be more than offset by our reduction in national oil production because we are unwilling to drill in Alaska and offshore. In other words, the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela have us over a barrel.
