The Delahunt-Chavez deal: what's the problem, exactly?

What a fascinating story this is.  Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-Quincy) has personally cut a deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to provide millions of gallons of low-cost heating oil, to be distributed through Citgo (which is a subsidiary of the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company) and handled here by Citizens Energy, Joe Kennedy's outfit that for years has been helping poor area residents find affordable heating oil.  The back-room goings-on behind this deal are a tale worth reading.

Sounds great, right?  Some people don't seem to think so.  Chavez, of course, is not exactly on the Bush administration's A-list - he's the guy who publicly called Bush a "crazy man" and an "assassin," and his distinctly left-leaning government is fairly tight with Fidel Castro.  And so Steve Johnson of the right-wing Heritage Foundation has piously proclaimed that deal-cutting with someone like Chavez "is not something I'd like my congressman to be doing."

Let's take a moment for a reality check.  It's not like we don't do business with Venezuela already - they're our fourth-largest supplier of petroleum products, and they own the omnipresent Citgo.  And who's number 1?  Why our good friends the Saudis, of course.  Oh, but of course, we would never cut deals with them.

Mr. Johnson, I assume, earns a nice salary from the Heritage Foundation, and is able to pay the heating bills on his pleasant home in Silver Spring, Md. without thinking twice about it.  Apparently, it's more important to him and his ilk that foreign leaders who don't like the Bush administration be easily portrayable as bad, bad, bad, than it is that low-income Americans be able to heat their homes.  Or maybe he doesn't think the private sector should have any role at all in helping poor people with their heating bills - rather like the CEO of a different oil company, ConocoPhillips, who told Congress not long ago: "We feel it's not a good precedent for one industry to fund a program as such.  We think that's a responsibility of the government."  Oh, but whoops, the government has seriously underfunded its principal program to help poor people buy heating oil, and Senate Republicans recently blocked an effort to bring funding up to authorized levels.  So, Mr. Johnson, what's your solution?

If Hugo Chavez wants to bolster his image with the American public by selling them cheap heating oil through Citgo, I have a hard time seeing what the problem is.  Call it petro-diplomacy if you want.  At least his government doesn't underwrite Islamic extremism.  Joe Kennedy has it right: "You start parsing which countries' politics we're going to feel comfortable with, and only buying oil from them, then there are going to be a lot of people not driving their cars and not staying warm this winter. There are a lot of countries that have much worse records than Venezuela."

Anyway, so Chavez doesn't like the way Bush is running the country?  Big deal.  He's not alone.