By Rick Manning
Where is the outrage, Joe?
The communist dictatorship in Venezuela has been engulfed by citizen protests for two months. High profile celebrities including a former Miss Venezuela, have been murdered in escalating lawlessness throughout the country. Students and others have peacefully taken to the streets and have seen dozens of their brothers and sisters slain by government intimidators acting on behalf of Hugo Chavez’ successor government. A government seeking to enslave the people under the same iron fisted control that their mentor Fidel Castro has imposed in Cuba.
In spite of the government sponsored violence, the one person in the United States who can get the Venezuelan government’s attention has been eerily quiet.
Former U.S. Representative Joe Kennedy is that person. Kennedy is in the unique position of having been the anti-American Venezuelan regime’s American shill for years. Kennedy has been operating as a defender of the Venezuelan despots through his Citizen’s Energy group through which Chavez donated some of his country’s heating oil to help people in America, in exchange for Kennedy defending the repressive Venezuelan regime.
The irony of Venezuela’s public relations ploy of reportedly giving away half a billion barrels of their nation’s wealth is that the people of Venezuela themselves have seen their country fall into poverty as the redistribution schemes of Chavez and now, Nicolas Maduro, have led their country to the precipice of economic disaster.
The state owned oil industry is the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, yet the Venezuela’s people are suffering under harsh conditions. February’s inflation rate hit 57 percent, and living costs in the capitol city of Caracas are 32 percent higher than in New York City. As the Venezuelan currency collapses under the weight of failed wealth redistribution schemes, the government of Spain has cancelled a contract with Maduro to provide riot gear and other crowd control equipment.
Yet, Chavez and Maduro’s best friend in the United States remains unmoved. Opposition leaders are jailed, students are being shot in the streets, people are seeing the cost to live double in a year, and Joe is gagged by his oily partnership.
Kennedy, whose main claim to fame is that he is the son of former U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, has turned his family’s name on its head. His silence stands in stark contrast to his Uncle John F. Kennedy’s famous” Ich bin ein Berliner” speech where the President declared all Americans to be Berliners when that city was divided by the Berlin Wall, and the people of the east trapped in a communist hell for a generation.
Rather than stand against tyranny, despicable Joe quietly sits by hoping his blood oil comes in so he can get his annual heating oil delivery photo op.
And this is how the Kennedy family legacy ends, not with a roar, but in the simpering acquiescence of a man too small to live up to his name.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government
