The Kennedys are disgusting.

Joe Kennedy’s back, playing Santa Chavez with a new sleigh full of Venezuelan heating oil for “the poor.” The tropical dictator’s politicized “gift,” however, comes with strings. We see Joe dancing on them.

“Our government gets their panties in a knot much more than most Americans do about Hugo Chavez,” Kennedy told the Boston Globe. “I’ll tell you I wish we had a little more leadership in this country that has a concern for the poor and the disenfranchised as we do in other parts of the world,” he said, adding that he would never be “in the tank to Hugo Chavez.”

But Kennedy’s been in the charity oil business for years, and he knows that Chavista crude isn’t the only solution for high oil prices hitting the poor. Oil can be bought, and he could get the cash just as easily for his program by hitting up some foundation to buy the oil.

What this is really about is advancing Chavez’s U.S. agenda, a big part of which is to blame U.S. oil companies for high oil prices.

What Joe Kennedy is actually doing here is allowing Hugo Chavez to meddle directly in US politics. Given Chavez’s open admiration for Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy must be spinning in his grave.

More: Some additional thoughts on this. Once in a while, some lefty will send me an email purporting to demonstrate some connection between President Bush and the Nazis via his grandfather. It’s tenuous stuff, but there’s a segment on the conspiracist left and probably right that buys into it and thinks it should somehow convince people that Bush’s policies and especially the war in the here and now are driven by what his grandfather did or didn’t do several decades ago.

Meanwhile, in the here and now, we have Joe Kennedy, a member of America’s other dynastic political family, sucking up to a tyrannical thug who is openly hostile to the US. This thug has declared multiple times that he hates the US and our “imperialism” and at the last OPEC meeting said that he wanted to spark an oil war against us. This thug menaces our democratic allies in his neighborhood and builds alliances with the mullahs in Tehran among other bad actors on the world stage. In sucking up to him, Kennedy and his ilk are doing everything that the conspiracists accuse Bush’s grandfather of having done. And it’s going on right now, in front of our eyes. Yet I never hear criticism on this from any conspiracist, or indeed, just about anyone on the left. Ever.