Citgo, owned by the Venezuelan government, said earlier this week that it was about to suspend its free heating-oil program for the poor in the United States. This has led Joseph P. Kennedy and others to urge Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to tell Citgo to keep the program, which, for a while anyway, Mr. Chavez will do.

Mr. Kennedy is chairman of Massachusetts’s Citizens Energy Corporation, which has been a recipient of the free oil. Citizens Energy is called a “nonprofit” organization, though Mr. Kennedy is paid about $400,000 a year to preside over the firm, which has helped some poor New Englanders.

Citgo cited falling oil prices in canceling the program, which Mr. Chavez has found a useful propaganda device, and Mr. Kennedy has been cast as a supporter of the near-dictator.

Mr. Chavez had used the once-soaring price of oil to initiate lots of social, military and other programs in his far-too-oil-dependent nation. Now that the prices have crashed (they will soar again), he’s got a big political problem in not being able to keep his promises, and his popularity has been falling.

Mr. Kennedy rightly accuses Hugo Chavez’s critics of hypocrisy in not mentioning how such nations as Russia and Saudi Arabia also enthusiastically use the oil weapon, in their own ways. It’s too bad that we have become so dependent on energy from dubious places. Consider how much better off we’d be if Sen. Edward Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy’s uncle, had not been successful so far in blocking Cape Wind’s proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound near the Kennedys’ summer houses. It would provide a great deal of clean, reliable and nearby energy, including for heat — and be utterly free from the policies and personalities of foreign dictators. New England does have lots of its own energy — if it would just fend off the opposition of rich and powerful individuals and use it!