I hear a lot about Joe Kennedy getting oil for his non-profit company at a cut-rate price from Hugo Chavez to help poor Americans. Some people seem to think we shouldn't take the cheap oil and others say we should. It is obvious that Chevez is doing this for propaganda purposes, and Kennedy is helping his effort. I saw Kennedy on TV and he made the point that Exxon and Chevron are buying oil from Chavez, so what is the difference. He also pointed out that the oil companies were making a profit on the oil. The profit part appeared to particularly irk him. Some of his critics say that we should quit buying oil from Chavez, while others say oil is fungible, so it doen't matter since Chavez will just sell the oil to someone else and we will buy the oil that the other group is no longer buying. This is an interesting debate. One point I would make is that oil is not as fungible as money because crude oil is not all the same. Refineries that are set up to process the heavy crude from Venezeula would have to be modified to handle oil from another source. So it is not a simple matter to change suppliers. Regarding Kennedy, I suspect that he, like most of the liberal Democratic Party leadership and big contributors, including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George Soros, and the Hollywood crowd, never met a socialist dictator they didn't like.