Call Joey Three Sticks for Chavez

With the Venezuelan ‘election’ looming in early December, yesterday’s Boston Globe carried an Op Ed column written by a liberal who warned Globe readers about getting to cozy with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez:

In the '70s and '80s, American liberals established a legacy of opposing right-wing, authoritarian regimes throughout Latin America. They should not stain that legacy by embracing the authoritarian Chávez simply because he comes from the left and joins them in fighting President Bush.

Funny. I thought liberals were all agreed about fighting Al Qaeda!

Rare kudos to the Globe Op Ed cloister for publishing this piece. Perhaps even the Globe’s amazingly flexible editorial logic has been strained to the breaking point by Chavez.

Today’s Wall Street Journal editorial page adds a note on a former Massachusetts congressman who remains an unrepentant Chavez supporter – none other than Joseph P. (“Joe-4-Oil”) Kennedy III. In a witty piece entitled ‘Dial Joe-4-Chávez’, the Journal takes Joey Three Sticks down a peg. Joe was interviewed last week in the Washington Post and asked whether Chavez’s cheap oil plan showed that he was really concerned about the American poor or was instead just seeking good publicity. Joe’s response:

“It's not only morally righteous, it's good business,” Kennedy said in a telephone interview yesterday. “When you're selling to the world's largest market a gigantic percentage of your overall sales in crude oil, you take a little percentage and show that you have concerns about how low-income people are going to keep up with the enormous price of keeping warm.”

Apparently this is how Joe explains that Chavez’s cheap oil ploy is NOT a publicity stunt but a show of true compassion. In all fairness, given the family history Kennedy could be unfamiliar with what constitutes the “morally righteous” except in the context of liberal politics. Meditate on the quote above the next time you hear liberal Democrats like Joe explaining their concept of “economic justice”.

In the WSJ piece, Joe K digs in deeper with Hugo:

We dialed Joe-4-Oil ourselves to ask directly whether it is also "righteous" to assist an anti-American tyrant at the expense of the Venezuelan people. In between berating our reporter for daring to ask such a thing, Mr. Kennedy said that Mr. Chávez has done "so much more" for the poor than any previous government. As for democracy, he said there was "ample room for improvement in the ways that people get elected in Venezuela as well as in Florida."

The WaPo story is here, the Globe Op Ed piece here, the WSJ editorial here (subscription), and OpinionJournal here.

UPDATE: I apologize for the error, but although Joe-4-Oil Kennedy is the 3rd Joe Kennedy in the clan (the oligarch-ambassador and his son the WWII bomber pilot being numbers 1 and 2), he goes by Joe Kennedy II. My mistake.