"Top 10 Feminist Fiascoes of 2014"

2014 was not a very good year for feminism.

Despite its considerable power and influence in the media and in the educational system, feminism has squandered a considerable amount of its good will by leaping before thinking.

Allowing themselves to be driven by a primal ideological zeal, feminists often embraced the wrong people and the wrong causes. Someone should have told them to make better use of their minds.

The result: the feminist brand has been damaged. Let’s say that it is down but not out.

Schadenfreude, anyone.

For our edification and to enhance the joy of the season Charlotte Allen has compiled the Top 10 Feminist Fiascoes of the year.

One is slightly surprised to see the list in the mainstream Los Angeles Times, but that’s not a reason to complain.

Many of these have been covered on this blog, for which I happily give myself credit.

I will not list them all, but just a sampling to whet your appetite. Allen’s column deserves to be read and savored in full.

Leading the list is Jackie, the authoress of the UVA rape hoax.

Allen explains the story:

Rolling Stone’s 9,000-word feat of “investigative reporting” smelled worse than a bucketful of day-old chicken heads from the day it was published on Nov. 19. A three-hour serial sexual assault atop a pile of glass shards as a fraternity-initiation ritual? Really? Yet many feminist (but fortunately not all) in America bought into this over-the-top tale because … it’s a feminist axiom that no woman ever lies about rape. Over at #Istandwithjackie, they’re stillstanding with alleged victim Jackie even though her story has been chopped into glass-shard-size pieces by real reporters doing their jobs.

Then, there was the great feminist heroine, Texas state senator Wendy Davis, who famously filibustered abortion restrictions.

Davis became the Democratic candidate for governor of Texas ... and lost by 20 percentage points.

Last, for this post, was the horror that occurred at Rotherham, England.  There, a real rape culture existed. It was perpetrated by Muslim men on young British girls, with impunity. It was ignored by the authorities, but also by feminists.

Allen explains it:

Now there was a real rape culture: nearly two decades of sexual assault, exploitation, and trafficking of teenage girls, mostly by British-Pakistani men, that had been covered up by British authorities for fear of stirring up anti-Islamic sentiment. The response of U.S. feminists was mostly crickets chirping. Why? Perhaps because the perpetrators weren’t the white middle-class men who are feminists’ preferred villains.

If I recall, I called this a modern form of human sacrifice, performed in order to assert that one was free of the taint of Islamophobia.

The Case Against Materialism

It fits the season.

To put the holiday into perspective the American Psychological Association has released an interview with psychologist TimKasser.

In it Kasser explains that people who are materialistic, who measure life in terms of goods acquired, are less happy and less functional than those who value relationships.

One might say that people who define themselves as moral beings are generally happier than are those who define themselves as beings of desire.

Those who see humans as beings of desire often underemphasize the acquisitive aspect of desire, but if you define yourself as a being of desire you will naturally try to attain whatever you desire, be that objects or experiences.

Kasser does not make the point, but one may ask whether the same holds true for atheists. After all, atheists derogate the spiritual side of life. They reject the existence of a divine creator and benefactor. They believe in materialism.

But does this make them more materialistic? It seems logical that it would. It is worth asking the question.

Kasser explains that materialism impacts one’s relationships. Surely, he makes good sense:

We know from research that materialism tends to be associated with treating others in more competitive, manipulative and selfish ways, as well as with being less empathetic. Such behavior is usually not appreciated by the average person, although it is encouraged by some aspects of our capitalist economic system.

If you believe that your value as a human being can be directly measured by the quantity of your possessions, you will do what it takes to acquire more. You will not care about what you have to do to other people to gain more possessions than they do. And you will see people only as a means to acquiring more or an obstacle to acquiring more.

It follows logically a materialist might even see other people as objects to possess. He might see them as objects to horde or as objects to use and discard. If they are purely material beings, what would prevent you from seeing them as objects.

It’s not going to make them happy, but, for all I know, they might not believe in happiness.

In more real world terms, psychological research has demonstrated that materialistic values will undermine one’s emotional well-being.

In Kasser’s words:

We know from the literature that materialism is associated with lower levels of well-being, less pro-social interpersonal behavior, more ecologically destructive behavior, and worse academic outcomes. It also is associated with more spending problems and debt. From my perspective, all of those are negative outcomes.

And also:

We found that the more highly people endorsed materialistic values, the more they experienced unpleasant emotions, depression and anxiety, the more they reported physical health problems, such as stomachaches and headaches, and the less they experienced pleasant emotions and felt satisfied with their lives.

How then should one go about enhancing one’s well-being?

Kasser answers:

Specifically, materialistic values are associated with living one's life in ways that do a relatively poor job of satisfying psychological needs to feel free, competent, and connected to other people. When people do not have their needs well-satisfied, they report lower levels of well-being and happiness, as well as more distress.

Let’s see: happiness is associated with having the freedom to make decisions that influence the course of your life. This applies, I mention in passing, that believing that your life is a preordained script, one whose outcome is inevitable regardless of how you conduct yourself, will not make you very happy.

Happiness is also associated with the competence you demonstrate when you perform tasks successfully.

As for the notion that happiness, involves being connected to other people, it is worth noting that moral principles like: "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" promote human connection.

But, these precepts are Biblical. Does this mean that those who reject religion in the name of materialism will be led, inexorably, to see their neighbors as competing for goods and to do unto others as they do unto you.

Materialists believe that they can assure their place in society by acquiring more goods. The opposite is true. Pursuing goods for the sake of pursuing goods alienates other people and produces social isolation.

How does one transcend vulgar materialism?

One starts by being kind, considerate and generous toward other people. It means offering a gift that the recipient would like to have, not one that you would like to give. It means taking the time and trouble to think about the other person and to find the right and suitable gift for him.

It might feel strange coming from psychology, but the research shows that those who keep the spirituality in Christmas are generally happier than those who see the holiday in terms of material possessions.

In Kasser’s words:

Psychologist Ken Sheldon and I co-authored a study that found that to the extent people focused their holiday season around materialistic aims like spending and receiving, the less they were focused on spiritual aims. We also found that people reported "merrier" Christmases when spirituality was a large part of their holiday, but reported lower Christmas well-being to the extent that the holiday was dominated by materialistic aspects.

Today’s trendy atheists might consider it a challenge. One suspects that those who believe that there is no God must have very little interest in promoting spirituality. Some of them might identify as pagans, but presumably atheists do not merely reject the one god. They must reject all gods.

If theirs is the most rational point of view, the one that most befits human nature, how do they explain the fact that, when put into practice materialism seems to make people miserable.

Sexual Permissiveness and Marriage

Did feminism save marriage? The debate rolls on.

Among those who doubt that feminism saved marriage is Ross Douthat from the New York Times. As always, Douthat’s arguments are cogent and thoughtful.

For my part I addressed the question in a previous post.

There I did not address a slightly different argument, proposed by Bloomberg’s Noah Smith.

It was not just gender-bending that saved marriage, Smith explained, but sexual permissiveness has also contributed.

By that he seems to mean pre-marital sex. Unfortunately, he does not explain why a permissive attitude toward pre-marital hookups will necessarily lead to a rigid rejection of permissiveness within marriage.

In Smith’s words:

What if sexual permissiveness and feminism, instead of being toxic to the institution of marriage, are the key to saving it?

That might sound crazy, but here’s the case in a nutshell. If you wait until marriage to have sex, you’re taking an enormous risk. What if you’re not compatible? Or what if you regret not having shopped around?

Sexual permissiveness means that sex isn’t about marriage. But that means that marriage isn’t about sex. Most of the upper-class liberal educated Americans I know who are in stable, happy marriages had their share of premarital sex. Knowing what that lifestyle is like — and realizing that they wanted more — allowed them to be more content in their marriages, and more realistic about what marriage is all about (i.e., lifetime companionship and raising kids).

Douthat fired back with an argument based on social science:

But when you look specifically at sex itself, at patterns of actual sexual activity and their link to marital happiness and longevity, direct evidence for a permissiveness premium is extremely hard to find. And for women, almost all the the data points sharply in the opposite direction. Notwithstanding the potential for regrets, women who only had sex with their future spouse are more likely to be in a high quality marriage than women who had a higher number of sexual partners. Divorce rates arehigher for women with multiple premarital partners than women who had only one; they’re twice as high for women who have cohabitated serially than women who only cohabitated with their future husband. Independent of marriage, relationship stability is stronger when sex is initiated later, and monogamy and a restricted number of sex partners isstrongly associated with female happiness and emotional well-being, period. And these results hold irrespective of education levels, as this piece by Brad Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger points out: There’s a stronger correlation between multiple premarital partners and marital instability among less-educated Americans, but well-educated Americans, too, show much stronger marital outcomes when they have fewer premarital partners. (And interestingly, the usual connection between education and stability disappears entirely for people who married their first partner: They’re equally unlikely to divorce no matter whether they attended college or not.)

He adds that sexual permissiveness is less practiced among the  upper classes than among the lower American classes:

And they seem at least compatible with the idea, frequently raised by conservatives (myself included) and scoffed at a bit by Smith, that an sexually-permissive culture benefits an upper class that’s still taught forms of restraint and caution implicitly at every level of its education, and that therefore ends up being less promiscuous overall and less likely to serially cohabit before marriage than the rest of the society … and ends up happier and more settled in marriage as a consequence.

Allow me now to add a few further reflections about the topic. One appreciates that Smith's argument is logical. Unfortunately, it does not hold up well to scrutiny.

Smith assumes, almost as an article of faith, that all sex is created equal, that sex within a marriage or a relationship is the same as casual sex with someone you met an hour ago.

For most people, certainly for most women this is not the case.

To imagine that sex is just another way to experience pleasure is a philosophical sophistry. It does not address the question of who or what is experiencing the pleasure. Does the pleasure belong to a body or a person? Is it a release of physiological tension or an affirmation of a connection?

If a couple is involved in a socially recognized relationship, if they bear titles that designate them as conjoined-- husband and wife or even boyfriend and girlfriend-- the experience changes.

It is simple-minded to assume that sex is always sex, regardless of who is involved, regardless of the nature of their relationship.

If we are going to credit permissiveness for having saved marriage, we ought at least to recognize that it has its downside.

Smith does not mention the increased incidence of STDs. Perhaps he does not care or perhaps he thinks that the risk is worth assuming, but clearly they remain a risk factor.

If you want to support permissiveness, you also need to acknowledge the risk, and thus one cogent reason why human societies have tended to frown upon it.

For women, sex within a committed relationship has much more to recommend it than exploring one’s sexuality. From a Darwinian perspective this makes good sense. A woman who has sex with a man who is not committed to her risks having a child whose father will repudiate his offspring. Thus, she risks having to bring up a child alone.

Of course, many people today consider this to be no big deal, but human nature is what it is. Its logic was designed to produce the best conditions for childrearing.

The emotional matrix underlying sexuality does not change with the law. You cannot legislate reality.

In our new age, many women choose to defer marriage and childrearing but do not defer sexual experience. If so, they will have endured more than their share of breakup traumas and failed relationships.

If a woman is more likely to see a sexual encounter as leading to a committed relationship, her policy against being tied down too early will cause her to suffer more relationship traumas.

If sex within marriage is significantly different from sex outside of marriage, then Smith’s argument becomes more dubious.

Smith should acknowledge that throughout human history most marriages have been more-or-less arranged. In more than a few cases, the couple was not sexually compatible. And in more than a few of those the solution to the problem was adultery.

In fact, it is relatively rare in human history for romantic love to be associated with marriage.

The point is often overlooked. Thus, it deserves to be repeated.

Whatever Smith means when he says that sex is not about marriage, he is overlooking the fact that a real marriage must be consummated. Failure to consummate a marriage is grounds for nullification, for declaring that the marriage never was a marriage.

When we ask about sexual compatibility, we should notice that individuals who defer sexual congress are often perfectly aware of whether or not they desire their partners.

True enough, this often leads to a certain amount of clumsiness, but still most men do not grant women extra credit for being very experienced sexually.

Smith does not mention the fact that human beings who find each other sexually compatible today might not find each other sexually compatible tomorrow. One suspects that this has very little to do with how much sex they had prior to marriage.

Next, Smith argues that couples who have tried out sex before marriage will then be able to make a rational decision about whether they want to continue it within marriage. Does he really believe that the decision of whether or not to get married depends on the quality of the sex? 

I would raise a slightly disconcerting point. Why would people who have lived a permissive lifestyle, enjoying sex with whomever they please, easily adapt to a new relationship that required them, in principle to limit themselves to one sexual partner.

Even assuming that one’s spouse is the world’s greatest lover, someone who has practiced permissive sex might, given contemporary mores, feel entitled to continue the practice even when he is married.

Habits, once acquired, do not  just vanish in the cold night air.

Barack Obama's Truthiness

At his year-end news conference Friday President Obama said this about the Sony Corp. and its decision not to show its new movie, “The Interview:”

I wish they'd spoken to me first. I would have told them, do not get into a pattern in which you're intimidated by these kinds of criminal attacks.

The CEO of Sony, Michael Lynton replied:

We definitely spoke to a senior advisor in the White House to talk about the situation….The White House was certainly aware of the situation.

He added that the company consulted with the State Department, among others, about the risks.:

We were told there wasn’t a problem, so we continued to proceed. The U.S. government told us there wasn’t a problem.

Did Obama tell the truth?

In the most literal sense, he did. Sony did not speak directly and personally to the president.

And yet, Lynton did speak to a senior White House advisor and to the Obama State Department.

That means that President Obama was indulging in what Stephen Colbert has called truthiness. He did not lie, but he certainly did not tell the truth.

Barack Obama he is not just a single individual. He is the head of the executive branch of the American government. His administration, at very high levels knew what was going on. One of his senior officials was in direct contact with the CEO of Sony.

When you consult with a senior advisor of a president you assume, rightly that the person is acting in the name of the president and that your conversations are being reported back.

Obama the individual might not have spoken directly to Michael Lynton but his administration participated actively in the decision-making. That means that he himself, as leader of the government, was presumed to know what was going on and bears responsibility for the actions taken in his name.

Obama used truthiness to misrepresent his administration’s involvement and to deny his own presidential responsibility.

Women on the Job

If Joanne Lipman is right, women who enter the workplace do not adapt easily to the prevailing masculine ethos. Shockingly, they do not act like ersatz men; they act like women.

This does not make them less equal, Lipman suggests, but it does mean that men must accommodate their difference.

Lipman argues that women’s womanly behaviors—real or assumed-- cause them to lose out on business opportunities, to be paid less and to have fewer promotions.

Of course, this assumes that women want exactly the same thing as men want. It assumes that women, who Lipman says have different cultural habits, want to follow exactly the same life plan as men. If women's normal cultural habits are more valuable somewhere other than the workplace, perhaps women choose to invest more of their time and energy elsewhere.

Lipman fails to respect women's choices. And she believes that women should not to be penalized for making choices that value home over the job.

If a woman, Lipman explains, wants to extra time off or refuses certain assignments because she wants to spend more time with her children, companies should accommodate her preference.

But, will a woman who takes more time off to care for her children be as respected as workers who do not? It does not seem unreasonable to conclude that a woman who takes more personal time is seen as less dedicated to her job, and thus less apt to provide leadership?

Life is about trade-offs. A woman who believes that her presence in the home is crucial for her children should not complain about the fact that she loses out on a promotion to someone who has not done the same.

Besides, people respect leaders whose decisions are assumed to be what are best for the company. If your staff starts thinking that you have divided loyalties and that your decisions might have something to do with your personal life, they will be less apt to respect your leadership.

Lipman does not recognize this possibility. In fact, she believes that the real consequences that obtain when a woman acts like a woman on the job are the fault of men… or stereotyping and privileging.

To her mind, when women do not advance in their careers, men are at fault.

She never considers the possibility that women do not, at the end of the day, rise up the corporate hierarchy because they do not sell themselves as completely to the job as men do.

She does not, in other words, respect women’s choices. She argues that  women want exactly the same thing that men want and that they should be given it, regardless of whether or not they have earned it.

Beyond the fact that it is riddled with contradictions, Lipman’s article is an extended and disagreeable exercise in male bashing.

Naturally, she denies it categorically:

The point isn’t to blame men. In my view, there has been way too much man-shaming as it is. My aim instead is to demystify women.

But then, she goes on to blame men. Women want to be considered as equals in the workplace, but their habits are different. Since their feminine habits do not align with the workplace culture, Lipman wants men to adopt. If men do not do as she is telling them to do, women's lack of success is their fault.

This means that men are to blame for women’s cultural habits.  

In Lipman’s words:

I am convinced that women don’t need more advice. Men do.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love men. I’ve spent my career as a journalist at publications read primarily by men. All my mentors were men. And most professional men I’ve encountered truly believe that they are unbiased.

That said, they are often clueless about the myriad ways in which they misread women in the workplace every day. Not intentionally. But wow. They misunderstand us, they unwittingly belittle us, they do something that they think is nice that instead just makes us mad. And those are the good ones.

In short, men could use a career guide—about women. So I set out to discover what frustrates and perplexes professional men about the women they work with. My goal was to get to the bottom of issues that men face every day: why women often don’t speak up at meetings, why they can seem tentative when they do speak up, why there are so few qualified women in the management pipeline despite good-faith efforts to recruit them.

We are happy to know that Lipman loves men. We are happier to know that she owes them her professional success.

Yet, she has a funny way of showing her gratitude.

It’s one thing to be an equal. It’s quite another to ask for special consideration because you cannot adapt to the ambient culture.

Lipman argues that when women are reminded that they are women their performance suffers. The reason, she believes, is that women are stereotyped as less capable than men.

The thought is strange, because how many women do you know who manage, when they walk into the workplace, to forget that they are women.

Doesn’t this also suggest that if a man and a woman are competing for a promotion, the man can undermine his female competitor by reminding her that she is a woman?

By now, most men are cognizant of the dangers entailed by sexual harassment, so they have adopted more subtle, more polite and more courteous ways of treating women like women.

When Lipman argues that men must give special consideration to women, doesn’t this enforce what she calls a stereotype? If so, her argument crumbles.

Lipman explains:

A lot of this stuff seems innocent, but research tells us that just reminding women of stereotypes undermines their cognitive performance and confidence.

In a 1999 Harvard study of 46 undergraduate Asian women, researcher Margaret Shih asked some of the participants questions that highlighted their gender, such as whether they preferred co-ed or single-sex dormitory floors. She then gave all of the young women a 12-problem math quiz. Those who had been reminded of their gender solved an average of just 43% of the questions—six percentage points below the performance of a control group that had been primed with neutral questions (and 11 percentage points less than women reminded of their Asian heritage).

In most cases, when people talk about stereotypes, they mean that gender is a social construct. And yet, Lipman is saying that women are so fundamentally womanly that they cannot act like men, even when they are told to do so. If that is true, womanliness is essential, not incidental.

As for the notion of privilege, those who traffic in this concept assume that it is fundamentally unjust to privilege one group as against another.

But, don’t groups garner different reputations for different levels of success in the world. If one assumes that a male is more likely to be a great military commander, that might have something to do with the  fact that all of the great military commanders have been men.

One suspects that nearly all of the bad military commanders have been men too.

As for the question of whether armies would do better if they were commanded by women, there’s an easy way to find out. Promote more women, add more women at all levels of the armed forces and see what happens.

If the armies do better, then all past humans have made a grievous mistake. If they do not, if the presence of women proves to be too much of a distraction, if the presence of women promotes what is gingerly called fraternization and leads to the dismissal of a large percentage of the officer corps, then perhaps it was not such a good idea.

Effortless Trying

Some people believe, erroneously, that they can find moral truths and ethical precepts in brain waves.

Others prefer to examine the work of the great moral philosophers. In the West, we cite Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant et al. In the East we look to Confucius and Lao Tse (author of the Tao Te Ching.)

Confucius saw humans as social beings. His philosophy aimed at showing people how to get along with others while living in groups. Yet, it also shows how to develop good habits.

Taoism is more about personal self-interest.

Thus, Confucius and Lao Tse were not of one mind.

According to Prof. Edward Slingerland, the difference revolves around the concept of wu wei, which means effortless trying. It’s easily confused with what we call being oneself.

One arrives at effortless trying by expending a great deal of effort. One might say that it takes an enormous amount of work to make anything look effortless.

John Tierney reports:

Dr. Slingerland, a professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, argues that the quest for wu wei has been going on ever since humans began living in groups larger than hunter-gathering clans. Unable to rely on the bonds of kinship, the first urban settlements survived by developing shared values, typically through religion, that enabled people to trust one another’s virtue and to cooperate for the common good.

But there was always the danger that someone was faking it and would make a perfectly rational decision to put his own interest first if he had a chance to shirk his duty. To be trusted, it wasn’t enough just to be a sensible, law-abiding citizen, and it wasn’t even enough to dutifully strive to be virtuous. You had to demonstrate that your virtue was so intrinsic that it came to you effortlessly.

It’s one thing to follow the rules. Effortless trying involves following the rules and meaning it.

A faked apology is better than no apology, but you ought to aim toward making sincere apologies.

Some Western thinkers would say that the difference lies in the state of mind and that one should reconfigure one’s beliefs in order to make the rule-following more meaningful. To these minds, adding some understanding will make the gesture meaningful.

Such was not the Confucian way. As Tierney explained, the key for the Sage was that following the rules consistently, regardless of the effort required, will show you that they are the right rules and will make them feel natural, thus, second nature.

As it happens, anyone who gets it right without appearing to be straining himself will exude confidence and will attract people to him.

Tierney writes:

However wu wei is attained, there’s no debate about the charismatic effect it creates. It conveys an authenticity that makes you attractive, whether you’re addressing a crowd or talking to one person. The way to impress someone on a first date is to not seem too desperate to impress.

If you appear to be acting out of desperation, people will feel that you are pushing them away. They will feel that you are so self-absorbed that you are refusing to connect with them.

If you are treating depression, this philosophy recommends that you identify the behaviors that signify desperation and replace them with behaviors that signify confidence.

For Confucius, a right action that becomes second nature will become sincere.

Sincerity is not a state of mind except in the sense that the more natural it feels to follow the rules the more you will be able to do so effortlessly.

If you are making an effort to practice virtue, others will suspect that you are going through the motions, not really meaning what you are doing.

Tierney explains:

Through willpower and the rigorous adherence to rules, traditions and rituals, the Confucian “gentleman” was supposed to learn proper behavior so thoroughly that it would eventually become second nature to him. He would behave virtuously and gracefully without any conscious effort, like an orator who knows his speech so well that it seems extemporaneous.

He reports on how the concept of wu wei was defined two centuries after Confucius:

Hence the preoccupation with wu wei, whose ancient significance has become clearer to scholars since the discovery in 1993 of bamboo strips in a tomb in the village of Guodian in central China. The texts on the bamboo, composed more than three centuries before Christ, emphasize that following rules and fulfilling obligations are not enough to maintain social order.

These texts tell aspiring politicians that they must have an instinctive sense of their duties to their superiors: “If you try to be filial, this not true filiality; if you try to be obedient, this is not true obedience. You cannot try, but you also cannot not try.”

Taoists, Tierney adds, had a different idea:

Taoists did not strive. Instead of following the rigid training and rituals required by Confucius, they sought to liberate the natural virtue within. They went with the flow. They disdained traditional music in favor of a funkier new style with a beat. They emphasized personal meditation instead of formal scholarship.

Rejecting materialistic ambitions and the technology of their age, they fled to the countryside and practiced a primitive form of agriculture, pulling the plow themselves instead of using oxen. Dr. Slingerland calls them “the original hippies, dropping out, turning on, and stickin’ it to the Man more than 2,000 years before the invention of tie-dye and the Grateful Dead.”

Hopefully, this sounds somewhat familiar. Taoists were more introspective. They sought to liberate their impulses and instincts. They believed that they could do so without working very hard. Some of them even believed that hard work would prevent them from accessing their inner selves.

It is reasonable to ask how well the Taoist life plan worked out. How well did they do when they retired to the countryside to get in touch with their more primitive instincts? As well as the hippies?

Bailing Out the Castros

Why has Communism fail in Cuba? On the political left the answer is clear: American sanctions. Totalitarian Communism did not fail on its own. It failed because that great bully, America made it fail.

While the New York Times, among others, is cheering the new Obama administration policy on Cuba, the Washington Post, of all places, has denounced it as yet another ill-conceived bailout.

The Post editorialized that the Castro regime was on the brink of collapse. It had been on life support, surviving only because of the largesse of Russia and Venezuela.

Now that the price of oil has broken down, those countries can no longer keep propping up the Castro brothers. Thus, the end of Cuban Communism was in sight.

Enter President Obama:

On Wednesday, the Castros suddenly obtained a comprehensive bailout — from the Obama administration. President Obama granted the regime everything on its wish list that was within his power to grant; a full lifting of the trade embargo requires congressional action. Full diplomatic relations will be established, Cuba’s place on the list of terrorism sponsors reviewed and restrictions lifted on U.S. investment and most travel to Cuba. That liberalization will provide Havana with a fresh source of desperately needed hard currency and eliminate U.S. leverage for political reforms.

It does not seem like too much of an exaggeration to say that the Obama administration exchanged something of great value for very little. Then again, an administration that traded five senior Taliban leaders for an army deserter is, as Sen. Rubio noted, one of the world’s worst negotiators.

Like Venezuela more recently, Cuba has always been a troublemaker, a thorn in America’s side.

Why not leave Cuban Communism to fail on its own, thus to discredit an ideology that has brought nothing but misery to the people of that island?

Why did Obama do it?

You might think that President Obama is punishing America for repudiating him in the last election.

You might also think that a president who began his first term with an apology tour is closing out his second with a surrender tour.