Wherever we look these days, all kinds of hell is happening. Or just happened. Or may soon happen.

For Gaza’s 2 million-plus Palestinians, things are about as bad as things can get. Yet, a mind-boggling new poll just revealed most Gaza Palestinians are still clueless about who to blame for their misery that has shattered their lives.

Also: World leaders appear clueless about what, if anything, they can or should do about it.

A half century ago, Israel’s erudite diplomat, Abba Eban, famously quipped that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” But ever since Hamas so horrifically and brutally attacked Israeli families on Oct. 7, and fled with 253 hostages, it has been our world leaders who “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

There is a world of blame that must be shared. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres chose to be bizarrely even-handed and understanding even while condemning Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 attack. Infuriatingly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can’t bring himself to show even a shred of sympathy for Gaza’s Palestinian civilians who have been trapped in war’s cruelty just as Israel’s families were in October.

For five months now, world leaders have missed this opportunity to accurately redefine the current hostage crisis by just calling it what it really is: a crisis of two peoples who are being held hostage by Hamas.
If this sounds a bit familiar, it’s because it is. I wrote about it last December, urging our leaders to recast how they describe Gaza’s reality. I urged our leaders to publicly discuss this hostage crisis as an effort to secure freedom for “not just one, but two different sets of hostages Hamas has simultaneously imprisoned in Gaza.”

Namely:

Israelis Held Hostage by Hamas: In October, Hamas killed 1,200 in Israel and kidnapped 253 hostages, including elderly and disabled. Today, according to Israel, Hamas still holds 130 hostages, including 33 bodies of hostages who are believed dead.

Palestinians Used as Hamas’ Human Shield Hostages: Long ago, Hamas began digging the tunnels under apartments, schools and hospitals – trapping hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians into unwittingly becoming human shield hostages.

And after their successful terrorist attacks in October, Hamas terrorists fled home to Gaza and hid beneath the civilians they were supposedly protecting. Hamas made sure Israel would have to kill thousands of innocent families under whom the terrorists cowered.

In fact, Hamas’ cruel attack goaded the Israelis just so Netanyahu would massively retaliate. And Netanyahu fell into Hamas’ trap. Hamas leaders knew masses of Gaza’s civilians would be the first to die.

Hamas didn’t care. Hamas’ weapons suppliers and trainers in Iran didn’t care either. They just wanted to goad Israel into killing innocent civilians while the world watched, month after month.

Iran hoped the world would see Israel killing innocent Arabs – so world condemnation would halt Saudi Arabian and Gulf state plans to normalize relations with Israel. We’ll see.

But Hamas and Iran got one gift they couldn’t have predicted. Those videos of dead, wounded, starving and orphaned Gazans sparked waves of antisemitism throughout the United States and Europe. That return of the hater may be forever.

Despite my December proposal and plea, the UN’s Guterres and other world leaders never got around to fully and truthfully pinning the blame for this crisis where it belonged – on Hamas. And their failure to lead has been devastating.

Sadly and sickeningly, 71% of Gaza’s Palestinians believe Hamas was correct in attacking Israel on Oct. 7, according to a poll conducted this month by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. That’s way up from the group’s December poll in which 57% approved of the Hamas attack.

Perhaps you remember there were a couple of weeks in which the world saw streaming reports of Hamas atrocities committed against families in Israel that are as innocent as the terrorists’ own families back in Gaza. We saw and even some Gazans saw reports, photos and videos of Hamas terrorists killing parents in front of children, children in front of parents, babies in their cribs, violently raping women, mutilating bodies.

Remember, way back in October, the world saw a couple of weeks’ news about Hamas’ atrocities. And then five months of videos of Gaza’s human shield civilians tragically suffering the heart wrenching horrors of war.

Now this: 97% of Gaza and West Bank Palestinians who didn’t see those October news videos about Hamas’ atrocities believe the atrocities never even happened, that same poll showed. And a still huge 81% of those who saw the October news videos believe what they saw never happened.

Sometimes seeing is disbelieving.

Tribune News Service

FIRST MISFIRE: U.S. military and intel experts have concluded that a Palestinian terrorist rocket misfired after being aimed at Israel from inside Gaza, apparently launched by a group called the Islamic Jihad.

The misfired terrorist rocket quickly plummeted and exploded in the parking lot of Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital, killing masses of Palestinian civilians. And the tragedy was instantly (see also: predictably) exploited by Hamas, the terrorists who rule Gaza. Hamas had just committed mass atrocities in Israel, knowing that would goad Israel into a massive retaliation that would kill many of Gaza’s Palestinian population. That was fine with Hamas. Hamas instantly announced Israel had attacked the hospital, even though they had no evidence proving it.

SECOND MISFIRE: The news media of America and the world rushed to rocket around the world the news of the tragedy. But unforgivably, even the best of the U.S. news media linked the truth of that attack with Hamas’s apparent falsehood that blamed Israel without offering any evidence. Journalists of course all knew better: Hamas’ terrorists infamously live and launch attacks on Israel while using Gaza civilians as human shields. They are willing to see fellow Palestinians killed by Israeli retaliation — if it makes Israel look bad as the world watches.

Yet news organizations everywhere fell into the trap. Of course Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s famous news blanket that is funded by Qatar, instantly popped up on news screens everywhere reporting that Israel had attacked that Gaza hospital causing massive casualties.

The New York Times raced to splash news screens with its first erroneous report of the Gaza hospital explosion at 2:51 p.m. EDT Tuesday. But minutes later, at 3:06:40 p.m., despite having time to get themselves together, the Times again fell into Hamas’ trap, emailing: “Breaking News: At least 500 killed in Israeli strike on Gaza hospital, Palestinian officials say.” Israeli strike?

You might be thinking it was 100% true that the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said exactly that. But in this age of news manipulation by misinformation, media must rethink how and what they report.

It took two days for U.S. military and intel experts to conclude with certainty that the hospital bombing didn’t have the crater an Israeli airstrike would have created – but it had all the signs of a misfired Palestinian terrorist rocket that simply failed and fell.

But by then it was too late for truth to prevail. News screens had gushed apparent misinformation blaming Israel for the attack. That ignited rage throughout the Arab world. Instant protests of Arab activists and Palestinian sympathizers rocked Middle East capitals. Of course, that caused Arab leaders to cancel their planned summit in Jordan, where Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, U.S. President Joe Biden, Saudi and Gulf state leaders might have headed off the next hell in Gaza.

That’s how Hamas terrorists got what they wanted most this past week – the cancellation of what they knew would be an anti-Hamas Arab summit.

Tribune News Service

And that’s the way it was last week, after the news broke on Monday, and was confirmed by the White House, that about 10 classified documents (topics unknown) had been discovered in a Washington think tank office that Joe Biden and his aides used after his vice presidential term ended.

It was way back on Nov. 2 – six days before the 2022 election – that Biden’s personal attorneys found the documents in a locked closet in Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Biden’s lawyers reportedly called National Archives officials, who retrieved the documents the next day. Then the Archives called the Justice Department. Last Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Robert Hur, to look into the whole affair.

No doubt your inner investigative reporter is already asking: Who made the decision to say nothing about this newsworthy discovery in the following 67 days? And why was the secret stuff there anyway?

Maybe those secret documents actually were “inadvertently misplaced,” as Biden’s attorneys said in a statement last week. But maybe those classified documents were intentionally “misplaced” so opposition researchers or reporters might never see them. It has been known to happen.

Was there anything that could possibly embarrass the boss?

Perhaps there was classified intel stashed in the veep’s closet about foreign governments discussing how Hunter Biden was getting rich for being a son of a veep. Hunter made more than $1 million one year by serving on the board of Burisma, a Ukraine energy firm, when Biden was the Obama administration’s lead official in dealing with Ukraine.

Sure enough, on Thursday I uncovered all sorts of documentation that would surely embarrass Biden and his team. Well, I uncovered it by taking the blue plastic wrap off my home delivered New York Times. And there they were: Two stories spread all across the top of the front page. But none of it was classified top secret.

At the top right was the headline: “Classified files found at 2nd site linked to Biden.” By the end of the day the White House was admitting more classified documents had been found in the garage of Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. What Biden’s White House didn’t mention is they were found last Dec. 20. Why the delay? Just last September, Biden quite accurately called Donald Trump’s efforts to hide and keep classified documents “totally irresponsible.” Last week he was incoherent as he tried to explain how classified documents ended up in the garage where he keeps his Corvette.

At the top left was the headline: “The Tale of Hunter Biden Comes Front and Center.” The Times unveiled a huge investigative report detailing the schemes by which Hunter Biden profited off his dad’s prominence in global policymaking.

When all the investigations are done, Hunter Biden may be found guilty of a crime. But what this was most of all was a horribly sad tale of a son of a famous father who had lost loved ones, fallen victim to drug addiction and alcoholism.

We are left to recall the old story of how Joe Biden reacted when he first heard that Hunter joined Burisma’s board of directors. As Hunter told The New Yorker in 2019: “Dad said, ‘I hope you know what you are doing,’ and I said, ‘I do.’”

We will be watching a political payback re-dramatization of just what Hunter knew and did – and what he got for it – when the House Republicans’ showcase their hearings later this year.

Tribune News Service

So this is the right time to remind our capital’s cognoscenti that some areas of Washington governance can and must do better in 2023.

In the last week of 2022, we received some genuinely helpful wisdom from the highest perch of the most judiciously restrained of government’s three branches — the Supreme Court. It came in a dissenting opinion to the court’s conservative majority ruling on a case about America’s growing crisis at the southern border.

Last week, the Supreme Court blocked a plan of President Joe Biden’s administration to end the Trump’s administration’s so-called Title 42 rule that has been permitting the rapid expulsion of migrants without allowing their asylum requests to be processed. Trump’s Title 42 was controversial because it used concerns about spreading COVID-19 as the basis for immediately expelling the migrants. The Court’s conservative majority agreed with Republican officials in 19 states who argued Biden’s ending of Title 42 would trigger a massive surge of migrants that would overrun U.S. capabilities at the southern border.

But that court ruling was pointedly challenged by a most unlikely source — Justice Neil Gorsuch, a staunch conservative appointed by President Donald Trump. Gorsuch joined the court’s three liberal jurists in dissenting.

“The current border crisis is not a COVID crisis,” Gorsuch wrote. “And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.”

Gorsuch’s point here was that the executive and legislative branches had failed to find workable fixes for the growing immigration crisis.

Go to the website of the Department of Homeland Security, which is charged with securing our borders. Sadly, you will see no signs of creative crisis-fixing leadership from Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas.

When President Biden tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with leading efforts to solve the migrant crisis, I had hoped this would become her signature achievement. But we’ve seen no evidence of significant accomplishment.

So let’s solve the problem now: Let President Biden start 2023 by convening a televised White House summit of Central American officials and congressional leaders of both parties. There, Biden will announce that from now on, the No. 1 way migrants will be granted U.S. asylum — and work permits — will be in highly visible lines at each U.S. embassy or at special ad hoc U.S. consulates in every Latin American nation. Migrants who are terrified by gang violence and fleeing in fear will be processed at a new asylum center to be established in Mexico.

Let the Biden White House make solving this solvable border crisis its most prominent New Year’s resolution.

Tribune News Service

And the same goes for even our best-intentioned red flag laws — such as the one the Congress just approved, touching off a burst of belated bipartisan self-congratulation. Red flag laws can prove every bit as useless as those bits of cloth, if the laws are left to somehow enforce themselves, by federal, state and local law enforcement officials who allow themselves to become the government’s equivalents of limp noodle bureaucrats.

That is one of the tragic lessons we are now being forced to confront after a twisted young shooter, armed with new combat-style weapons he was allowed to legally purchase — despite police warnings! — rained 83 flesh-ripping combat rounds down a family-friendly Fourth of July parade through Chicago’s suburb of Highland Park.

The director of the Illinois State Police, Brendan Kelly, wants to be sure you know his agency handled everything strictly by the book. Even when it allowed Robert E. Crimo III to buy all those weapons — despite the fact that the state police received warnings of two red flag incidents in which Highland Park police classified Crimo as a “clear and present danger.”

You be the judge. (And in this case, you needed to be — because Kelly’s state police never brought the matter to a court’s attention.) Here, Your Honors, is what Kelly’s state police knew before allowing Crimo to buy his arsenal, on the grounds that it didn’t have enough info to ask a judge to decide:

In September 2019, Highland Park police went to Crimo’s home after a person (name publicly withheld) warned police the then-teenager had bladed weapons and threatened to “kill everybody” in the house. Police confiscated 16 knives, a dagger and a sword. Earlier that year, police had gone to the house after receiving a report that the youth had attempted suicide.

The Highland Park police filed what is called a “clear and present danger” report with the Illinois State Police. The youth’s father, Robert E. Crimo Jr., who lives elsewhere, reportedly told police all the bladed weapons were his and his son was just holding them for him. Police gave the knives, dagger and sword to the father.

Three months later, the youth, not yet 21, applied for a Firearm Owner’s Identification card, with his father signing as his sponsor. By 2020, young Crimo owned several guns, including the rapid-firing semi-automatic rifle he allegedly used to kill seven and wound many more.

The police who believed that the youth’s possession of 16 knives, a dagger and a sword was a “clear and present danger” may well have been able to convince a judge that possession of multiple rapid-firing rifles, magazines carrying 30 rounds and huge amounts of ammunition was at least as dangerous as those sharp blades.

Illinois State Police Director Kelly wants to be sure you know that his agency doesn’t have a copy of the report filed by the Highland Park police. Illinois’ red flag law was in effect in 2019.

Kelly emphasized Wednesday that family and friends should take the lead in matters such as this.

“This is so dependent upon the people that may be closest around the individual of concern, the person that may be posing a threat to themselves … or others,” said Kelly.

Time Out: Perhaps family members sometimes cannot lead an effort to block a gun purchase by an unstable family member — out of fear for their own safety at home.

Back in Washington, armed with our new federal red flag provisions, the attorney general and secretary of homeland security need to act at once. They need to swiftly provide all states with a template of procedures that will assure that red flag alerts have at least an enforceable chance of safeguarding us all.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist. This column was provided by Tribune News Service.

Indeed, anchors and analysts on the Rossiya network’s leading news-talk show, “60 Minutes,” seemed shocked into silence when the show’s invited guest, retired Col. Mikhail Khodaryonok — who in 2020 was awarded by Vladimir Putin Russia’s “Medal of the Order” for “Merit to the Fatherland” — began uttering the sort of forbidden truths that had been carefully concealed from the  propagandized public.

“The situation for us will clearly get worse,” said Russia’s former air defense commander. “ … We are in total geopolitical isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don’t want to admit it.”

Now, those words don’t seem shocking to our westernized eyes. After all, you’ve been reading similar warnings here and elsewhere for half a year. But millions of Russia’s trusting viewers of state TV have sadly been believing Putin’s version of Big Lies. And now one of Putin’s decorated military leaders was telling them that they’ve been conned.

The colonel warned them about the danger of being misled by official information channels that inaccurately spread false info about Ukraine’s military. This Russian officer’s assessment was filled with praise for the military opponent his country chose to attack.

“Sometimes information is being spread about some sort of psychological breakdown in Ukraine’s Armed Forces, suggesting some sort of a breakthrough is imminent,” the colonel said. “None of this has a basis in reality.

“Ukraine’s armed forces can arm 1 million men. One million of armed Ukrainian soldiers should be accepted as a result of the near future. … The European aid will fully come into effect, so a million armed Ukrainian soldiers needs to be viewed as a reality of the very near future. And it’s that situation that we need to get out of.”

This rarest Russian TV video — Col. Khodaryonok telling of tough truths on Russia’s state TV — has gone viral this week on the Russian social media website called VKontakte. It was an eye-opening first for millions of Russians who believed Putin and backed his Ukraine invasion.

Finally, we are now left with one tantalizing (see also: tormenting) unknown: Vladimir Putin surely wasn’t blindsided by Col. Khodaryonok’s views or willingness to say them on TV.

In February, before the invasion, he warned in a newspaper column that Ukraine would fight fiercely and the West would provide sophisticated weaponry. “There will be no blitzkrieg in Ukraine,” he wrote then. A couple of weeks ago, Huffpost.com reported, he warned publicly that a Russian military mobilization wouldn’t help in Ukraine.

“We don’t have the reserves, the pilots or the planes, so the mobilization would be of little help,” he reportedly said. “Sending people armed with weapons of yesteryear to fight against global-standard NATO weapons would not be the right thing to do.”

Hmmm. Perhaps we will soon be looking back and saying wisely that this week’s stunning video of the colonel telling tough-truths on state TV was our first clue that a fed-up Putin was building his own offramp — and planning a quick exit from an unconquerable Ukraine.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist. This column was provided by Tribune News Service.

With his polls still underwater and prices still soaring, Biden was clearly performing on our news screens and behind the scenes as his own master strategist, maestro and leading man. In White House news events and in appearances in the heartland, Biden seemed determined, indeed desperate, to reverse all negatives at once.

Yet as we watched, it seemed clear that Biden had been unable to channel his inner Scranton Joe.

Throughout his career, Biden has never been at his best when he was speaking and acting without the benefit of Scranton Joe’s Middle American instincts and restraining influences. He has always been at his best when he could hear and heed that inner voice, forged by the commonsense concerns of heartland families, as it demurred: “No, Joe! Don’t go there!” Surely there were times when it spoke to him just in time to avert the unwise blurt that had been known to become the gaffe that eclipsed the news he had intended to make.

Consider Tuesday. President Biden was going to hold one major news event to explain everything that his administration had done and will be doing to restrain and reduce inflation.

He would name each inflationary category: gasoline, groceries, prescription medicines, and so on, detail the inflationary cause of each, and detail his solutions. First the pandemic caused the inflation crisis. Then Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine made it way, way worse.

But there would be more: He also wanted to leave all middle-class Americans with a permanent positive impression that would remain with all who watched. Namely: That Joe Biden is as rock solid and working class as they are. He was raised in a family just like theirs. He shares their basic concerns and values — and especially their concerns about the need to control and reverse rampant inflation, the main concern that is discussed night after night at their kitchen tables; just the way it used to be discussed at the Biden family’s kitchen table.

But there would be still more: Biden was determined to bash and smash the pro-Trump wing that now dominates the Republican Party and attacks him regularly. He also would insist on coining and then repeating many times his favorite name-calling insult: “ultra-MAGA Republicans.”

Time out: In decades of talking with voters and holding focus groups with TV news watchers, I learned long ago that if a leader starts political name-calling, it turns off viewers big time. If the leader repeats it, he or she becomes no longer a trusted leader but just another politician that they no longer like or trust.

Also, viewers cannot keep track of issue complexities without visual graphics we all need to help us learn. And if a person is just talking a substantive but detailed stream of numbers, we all get confused, many lose focus, and very few remain positively impressed.

Fast forward: The result was a message politics disaster. Biden’s mash began with a monologue of 3,259 words, a stream of consciousness in which he self-destructed his own message strategy and goals.

There’s a lot that Scranton Joe could have suggested and cautioned, if only President Biden had thought to consult his inner voice of experience. After all, Scranton Joe knows well what those working-class families really wanted to hear their president tell them when they are faced with having to decide whether they can afford the groceries they need and the prescription drugs family members may require.

Epilogue: Two hours after Tuesday’s eye-glazing event, at the daily White House news briefing, reporters predictably asked about why Biden kept using the term “ultra-MAGA Republicans. “Who came up with this phrase ‘ultra-MAGA’?” a reporter asked. “Why the need to kick it up a notch? MAGA wasn’t enough?”

“I will tell you, it is the president’s phrase,” said press secretary Jen Psaki. She explained our wordsmithing president felt “adding a little ‘ultra’ to it” gave the phrase “a little extra pop.”

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist with Tribune News Service.

The images bring a flood of anguish into the lives of people who cannot bear looking at the horrific slaughter and inhumane cruelty that a superpower is inflicting upon its much smaller neighbor.

But these same people also cannot bear looking away. So they watch the blatant and undeniable war crimes that Russia’s military is inflicting upon Ukrainian innocents. They witness the Nazi-like cruelty of Vladimir Putin’s forces as they targeted and destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, fleeing families in train stations and fearful families in shelters that are now rubble.

And as they watch, viewers everywhere are thinking just what you are thinking: Why can’t our leaders do more to make them stop?

But very few around our planet (and probably not even you!) are thinking about the one organization that was created 76 years ago to mobilize a world of leaders to try to resolve, or at least reduce, this kind of crisis.

Were you really thinking about the United Nations? (Or do you think of the U.N. as an outmoded relic?) Were you really about to ask if the leader of the United Nations can do something to maybe give peace a chance in shattered Ukraine?

Probably not. You probably can’t remember the name of the United Nations’ secretary general. Not your fault; he’s not been in the news much. At the start of this 21st century, you’d have known well the name of the U.N.’s activist Secretary General Kofi Annan. In the Eisenhower era, you’d have known all about Dag Hammarskjold.

But there is something innovative the United Nations can and should be doing to inject a jolt of innovative geo-persuasion into our era of stagnant old-school diplomacy. The U.N. can spotlight how Putin has used his own Big Lie to con fellow Russians into accepting his Hitlerian compulsion to crush Ukraine. Starting with his whopper that Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government is a bunch of neo-Nazis.

Putin’s state media won’t show Russians the abhorrent reality of images all the world has been watching since he said he wouldn’t invade Ukraine and then invaded Ukraine. Putin’s polls are soaring. Moscow’s Levada Center, an independent public opinion organization, shows Putin’s approval rating climbed from 67% last October to 83% on March 20.

But wait — polls in a dictatorship may not provide a paint-by-the-numbers picture of what people really think.

Levada’s methodology, according to its website, was to interview 1,626 Russians in person, in their homes. Hmmm. Imagine you are an ordinary Russian in Putin’s dictatorship, where journalists can be jailed for calling Putin’s Ukraine war a war. A stranger at the door is asking if you approve of Putin’s policies and writing down your answers. Your responses may merely reflect your desire to remain free.

This is where we now need the help of an activist U.N. secretary general. He is in a perfect position to mobilize a virtual video initiative featuring a cross-section of world leaders, appearing in person or virtually, in a special General Assembly session, reading a few sentences to narrate a diplomatically unique video.

“A WORLD OF TRUTH: Global Leaders Reach Out to Russia’s Families” can spotlight for ordinary Russians the images of the war crime horrors all the world has been watching for the past 50 days of Putin’s invasion and shattering of Ukraine. Those images have become the world’s window into the shame that is Putin’s Russia today.

The video can end with the world’s leaders telling Russians that the world needs Russia to return to the moral values we all always shared, as allies when we defeated the actual Nazis.

Finally, the U.N. secretary general needs to mount a massive media effort to give Russians every chance to see this event somewhere, in which the world is speaking to them. Keep the video streaming, via YouTube, social media and all other resources of the global internet.

And if our innovative persuasion project is accomplished, you will never forget the name of our next Nobel Peace Prize laureate, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, of Portugal.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

Then he dressed up like a bird, donning a billowy white suit and white helmet, climbed into a motorized white-winged hang glider along with a skilled pilot. They took off on a flight designed to show he could get a flock of endangered Siberian cranes to follow him so they could learn how to migrate south for the winter.

Only one did.

So Putin, ever persistent, tried again. And this time five cranes began to fly with him. Three soon lost interest; but two flapped willingly alongside the white-winged craft piloted (or co-piloted) by their newfound alpha crane.

In 2022, things seem to be going much the same for Putin with his flock of flummoxed generals and inaccurate intelligence advisers. Their first invasion of Ukraine stalled on the ground, failing to achieve Putin’s military objectives. They failed at the basics: They couldn’t get food and fuel to their stalled invading forces. Ukrainian forces were stronger and far fiercer than Russia expected; Ukraine’s civilians were too.

Putin’s generals, fearing the career-ending brutality of their ruler’s wrath, deceived him about the extent of their invasion’s failure, according to U.S. officials. Just as Putin had been deceiving his people about what his invasion was all about from the outset. So things came full circle in Putin’s inner circle.

As Putin began realizing that his ground invasion wasn’t working, his troops began indiscriminately targeting with artillery, rockets and bombs Ukraine’s innocent civilians. He was, of course, killing and maiming and terrorizing the same women, children, elderly and infirm whom he had told his fellow Russians he merely wanted to liberate because Ukrainians are as Russian as they were. He made up a lie, saying he was liberating Ukrainians from a government run by fictional neo-Nazis. And Putin’s Big Lie worked, as millions of Russians believed him.

Now Putin has his forces circling back around for a second, face-saving try at invading Ukraine. But Putin’s innermost objectives are not entirely clear — probably not even to his own inner circle, which now appears more like a vicious circle.

Longtime Putin watchers believe that what the Russian dictator really wanted most was to re-create the power-and-glory — plus the fear-and-glory — that young Vladimir Putin most loved about old Joe Stalin’s Soviet Empire.

The real reason Russia invaded Ukraine, of course, has nothing to do with fake Nazis or feigned liberation. Or Ukraine’s Nobel-deserving Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Putin’s inner volcano has been erupting ever since 2014, when he became obsessed with his impression that Kyiv was way too publicly dissing Russia, its motherland. Just weeks before Russia was going to host a G-8 economic summit in Sochi, Ukraine spurned a new trade arrangement with Russia and sought to join the European Union. And Mount Putin erupted. He snatched Crimea.

The G-8 canceled its summit, expelled Russia, rebranded itself the G-7. And Putin has been militarily menacing Ukraine ever since.

Putin can bash Ukraine until, as Winston Churchill once put it, he makes the rubble bounce. But he cannot win.

And he may lose everything, once ordinary Russians become fed up at the global shame and economic suffering that will be Putin’s legacy.

That’s why Putin, being scheming smart, may soon get it: His smartest move now is to declare victory and get the flock out of Ukraine.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist. This column was provided by Tribune News Service.

As we watched, we were all Ukrainians. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was the brave leader who made us all want to fight for what is right. And this week we all grieved but could not look away as our screens filled our safe lives with unspeakably horrific pictures of Putin’s military demolishing a Ukraine maternity hospital. We heard TV anchors and correspondents saying it was a “bombardment,” an “airstrike.”

Our news screens recycled Zelenskyy’s weeks of frustration that the United States and NATO would not provide the “no-fly” zone that could help Ukraine stay safe or at least survive. We tensed with rage, but understood, as our president and other NATO leaders explained that if our military enforced a “no-fly” zone it meant shooting down nuclear Russia’s jets — and that could plunge us into a nuclear World War III.

But very few of us heard what two retired U.S. army generals — both frequent TV network analysts — had to say, separately, Wednesday afternoon and late that night. And apparently very few of the TV news anchors or their news-decider bosses heard them either.

At lunchtime, retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said the crater he saw on his screen looked like “a long-range strike” by ground launched artillery or missiles. “The majority of these strikes are being conducted by artillery and missiles,” Gen. Hertling said. The trigger is being pulled by a soldier who could be many miles away from the target. “So a ‘no-fly’ zone is no panacea,” he added. “This is the Russian way of war.”

Late that night, retired Gen. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmett said those war-torn homes, apartments, schools and hospitals we’d been looking at were mainly victims of “continuing fire from hundreds of ground-launched rockets and missiles.” Most were fired from 12 to some 60 miles away from their targets, he said. A “no-fly” zone would not affect those deadly assaults.

But the anchors didn’t then ask their military analysts how, or even if, Ukraine’s military could protect besieged Ukrainian citizens from ground-launched assaults that could indeed be causing the abhorrent devastation. And the news-deciders continued recycling the vain pleas and frustrations, of Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian political figures who still wanted the West to provide a protective “no-fly” zone.

Then on Thursday, C-SPAN provided wall-to-wall coverage of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s annual hearing in which the heads of all the intelligence agencies delivered their assessment of the national security threats America faces.

Perhaps the most globally meaningful facts were found during an exchange late in the hearing, initiated by perhaps the Senate’s most meaningful and even reasonable figure. Maine’s certifiably independent Sen. Angus King began asking the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, about what is causing all the damage such as that Ukraine hospital attack that has shaken the world.

“What’s hitting them?” the senator asked. “Is it mostly bombing from aircraft or is it missiles and artillery?”

And the DIA head replied: “It is a combination of mostly missiles and artillery and mobile rocket launchers.” Lt. Gen. Berrier added that actually, the Russian air force “is having a tough time” flying missions over Ukraine now, as defensive antiaircraft weapons supplied by the U.S. and others in NATO seem to be having an effect.

“So the talk about a ‘no-fly’ zone wouldn’t really impact what’s causing the damage?” Sen. King pressed. “A ‘no-fly’ zone wouldn’t inhibit missiles, rockets and artillery?”

Lt. Gen. Barrier replied: “That is correct.”

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist. This column was provided by Tribune News Service.

While Biden (whom I have known well for decades) indeed deserves great credit for having defeated his incumbent Republican presidential opponent, it is also true that Biden had a unique ally who greatly aided his effort: President Donald Trump.

Trump was the most blatantly lying, tragically incompetent, morally repugnant president in U.S. history.

And while Biden went on to defeat Trump, the victor’s party leaders must now also face the reality that, except for the very top of their ticket, it was the Democrats who finished as the predominant losers.

Much to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s surprise, chagrin — and yes, much to her own blame — the Democrats actually lost at least nine seats in the House. House Republicans lost zero seats, leaving still-Speaker Pelosi with the smallest margin of any House majority in 18 years. Republicans also captured two formerly Democratic state legislative chambers; Democrats captured zero, even in districts where their presidential standard-bearer was winning.

But most significantly, the House Democrats were bizarrely stunned by their poor showing on Election Night. And that gets us to the biggest problem Democrats will be facing in 2021 and perhaps for the foreseeable future.

Throughout the summer and autumn, the House and Senate Democrats didn’t seem to have a clue that they were flat-out failing in their campaign battles of message politics. Voters everywhere seemed to have no idea of a most-desirable overall theme about what the Democrats were really all about — and what a Democratic-controlled Congress would mean to them and their families.

Think of it: Democrats whiffed on the golden political opportunity to present voters with a powerful national plan — a red-state, blue-state pandemic “Rescue America” program to aid all Americans who have been thrown out of work, cannot feed their families, face eviction and so on.

Democrats also missed a classic chance to reach out to all those families that were, at one time, headed by registered blue-collar Democrats. They were voters who grew increasingly disillusioned with what seemed to be Democratic indifference to them and their problems. They grew increasingly into those Mad-as-Hell, Not-Gonna-Take-It-Anymore blue-collar Democrats. In July 2015, I wrote about them as being the folks who were flocking to the rallies of the brand-new Republican in the race: Donald Trump.

And I warned, in that way-early 2015 column, that on Election Night 2016, still more than a year away, we shouldn’t be surprised to see that those blue-collar Mad-as-Hell Trump voters just elected our next president.

Well, in the summer of 2020 — and increasingly ever since — those same blue-collar voters who had indeed backed Trump increasingly found that they and their families had become major victims of Trump’s leadership ineptitude. They had lost their jobs as the pandemic economy shut down. Now they were Wannabe-Working-Class voters.

Throughout the campaign, the congressional Democrats missed their chance to speak to them in plain-talk. The Democrats failed to lead by presenting a simple but comprehensive pandemic “Rescue America” program that made clear to voters in every state just what their families could get — and when. America’s blue-collar voters who needed to be rescued had no idea that they could be rescued by a party that really cared about them.

After the election, Democrats and Trump negotiators settled on a check for $600 for every adult or child earning less than $75,000. Last week, Trump — defeated after losing some supporters from his onetime solid base — tried to win them back by jumping suddenly to $2,000. Pelosi and the Democrats said a weak me-too.

Now the Democratic elites are wondering why they are no longer seen as the party of blue-collar America.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

As New York City’s ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg has just shown us.

But this we also know: Ultimately, even a billion-dollar blizzard of TV and digital ads can only work wonders when their creative messages and images of presidential decisiveness and leadership are reinforcing positive presidential messages and images we voters are also viewing each day on our free media TV and digital news screens.

This is a rock-solid reality about video ads that I discovered, proved and reported about years ago, in a book titled, “The Great American Video Game: Presidential Politics in the Television Age.” Wednesday night, its validity was verified for us yet again by Bloomberg’s surprisingly underwhelming and even inept performance in the first hour of the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate in Las Vegas, a prelude to Saturday’s Nevada caucus.

Bloomberg started off Wednesday night with a definite video head start. In the run-up to the debate we all saw a rerun of his now-familiar TV ad featuring a very presidential-looking Bloomberg being warmly praised by President Obama. It sure looked and sounded like Obama was endorsing Bloomberg for 2020, but it was just a snippet from a day when then-President Obama was praising Bloomberg’s support of a gun control initiative. Still, it seemed like a bigtime bonding of Obama and Bloomberg, who desperately needs to increase his support among black and Hispanic voters.

For weeks, Bloomberg had been prepping and rehearsing for the debate with his top staff. Surely they had to have anticipated Bloomberg would be asked about two major recent reports of controversies from his days as mayor: Bloomberg’s huge expansion of a stop-and-frisk program in which he had been recorded saying police should concentrate on high crime areas, stop young minority youths, throw them up against a wall and frisk them to see if they were carrying weapons. And Bloomberg’s reported settlements of workplace complaints with women who complained of sexual comments and workplace discrimination (and signed nondisclosure agreements as part of their settlements).

Sure enough, in the debate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren quickly challenged Bloomberg on the latter — the secrecy surrounding his harassment and discrimination case settlements with complaining women.

Stunningly, Bloomberg just stared blankly, stammered, rambled and appeared to have no idea what he should say or how he should say it. “Maybe they didn’t like a joke I told,” he said at one point. He said there were “some” women who had complained; later he said it was “a few;” and he wouldn’t be pinned down on how many women were involved.

When Warren pressed him to release the women from their nondisclosure agreements, he said, unclearly, that since the woman had signed the agreements, “it’s up to them.” Whatever that means. Joe Biden added his support for Warren’s point. And then she pressed once more: “You’re releasing them tonight, is that right?”

But Bloomberg seemed to be tap-dancing on quicksand: “I’m not going to end the agreements because they were made consensually.” Unfortunately, the NBC moderators moved to a different topic. An hour later, Bloomberg indeed had a presidential moment — as he showed impressive command of the issues and details about the urgent need to solve the mega-crisis of global climate change.

But by then, the presidential debate had degenerated into an unpresidential night of the mondo bizarro. The Democrats began mindlessly attacking each other — and everyone seemed to forget about attacking the incumbent they all have insisted must be prevented from being elected to serve four more years.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

It was hard to keep track of all the calamities that had been flashing across our news screens: a presidentially ordered assassination of a terror-bent Iranian general; all those fast-changing official explanations on just what President Trump really knew before he ordered the hit; the riots in Tehran protesting Iran’s shoot-down of an airplane it mistook for a U.S. missile; and of course, the looming presidential impeachment trial in the Senate, as new evidence has been surfacing with virtually every news cycle.

But the six Democrats seemed bizarrely content to just snip and snipe at each other. Blame can be evenly shared by the six Democratic presidential hopefuls. Not one of them had come to the debate locked and loaded to really lambaste Trump with the sort of vigor Trump relishes every time he blasts away at Democrats.

Then again, not one of the Democrats seemed to have come ready to actually challenge and debate any of their opponents on real issues. They seemed to be hoping the three news media moderators and facilitators would take the lead in doing their debate work by asking questions that challenged each candidate’s weaknesses in the questions.

And that gets us to what is really wrong with the way our political debates have evolved (see also: devolved). Our presidential debates are really not debates at all anymore. And the blame for that really belongs with just one key segment of our democratic political process: It is my colleagues in the news media who have failed in their roles of being moderators and facilitators of political debates. And it has never been more apparent than it was Tuesday night.

Tuesday’s debate began in a most unfortunate way — and frankly that was because of the line of questioning pursued by the anchoring moderator, my longtime friend Wolf Blitzer of CNN. Wolf began by very properly focusing on the latest war-and-peace crisis in the Middle East. “Just this month, the United States and Iran were on the brink of war, which has reignited the debate over America’s role in the world …,” he began. But he then pursued it by merely asking each candidate why they were the best candidate to be commander in chief — which of course was just a lobbed softball each candidate could hit out of the park.

But suppose Blitzer had told all candidates: “Let’s start by imagining this is not a debate stage — you all are in the real White House Situation Room. You’ve been given the alarming information the president had about the events in the Middle East. How would each of you handle this crisis? Would you order the assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qassem Soleimani? Who would you consult? What steps would you take?”

And after each candidate spoke, Blitzer could have told the rest of them: “This is your debate. So if you disagree with someone, this is the moment you must speak up, challenge and debate them.”

Instead, two time-wasted hours later, we found ourselves relying, once again, on the wisdom of just one pundit — the legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel. After years of managing the champion New York Yankees, Casey wound up at the helm of the brand-new Mets, hapless losers whose ways once led Casey to be quoted by my pal, writer Jimmy Breslin, as asking in frustration: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

They are sure the finale will feature America’s 45th president (although forever disgraced as history’s third president impeached by the House) celebrating a decisive not guilty verdict in his Senate impeachment trial.

What Official Washington hasn’t really grasped is that the moment the trial ends, Trump will start proclaiming loudly, forevermore, that the Republican-controlled Senate exonerated him of all accusations. So it is now un-American for Democrats to talk about it ever again.

But the Senate cannot allow it to end that way. Because that ending would pervert justice, be flat-out untrue — and mainly, it will besmirch Republicans by implying that they condone his contemptible conduct.

Yet there is one suggestion that can make the final outcome more truthful and just — for both Republicans and Democrats. We’ll get to it in a minute.

First, consider the reality that will confront both sides the moment the Senate votes not to convict Trump of the conduct for which he was impeached. Senate Republicans will still believe they know what President Trump really did — and know it was wrong and probably illegal. Namely: Trump used the prospect of U.S. military aid to pressure Ukraine’s new president to do him a personal political favor by investigating Joe Biden and the Democrats.

And Senate Republicans will know the reason they voted “not guilty” was because they didn’t think Trump’s wrongdoing rose to a level that justified removing him as president.

But Republicans who care about morality will not want history to presume they approved of his clearly wrong and probably illegal conduct. Many Republicans privately despair of what their leaders are doing to shame if not shatter their party’s reputation.

Today, virtually all Republican senators know they would still vote to impeach and remove any Democratic president who did the same things Trump did. Definitely. Undoubtedly. Period. Exclamation point!

The Senate’s ultimate problem is that a “not guilty” vote is their only option if they don’t want Trump removed as president in the 2020 election year. But that’s not how it has to be. Senators can keep the obvious eventual outcome — but still make sure their vote is not interpreted as justifying Trump’s clearly wrong conduct.

Consider this: Let the Senate’s Republicans and Democrats forge a bipartisan compromise resolution that won’t change the outcome of the impeachment “not guilty” votes, but will accurately put it in context and express the Senate’s disapproval of the way the Ukraine aid matter was conducted.

Immediately after rendering their impeachment verdicts, Senate Republicans and Democrats can enact a bipartisan resolution of non-exoneration, condemnation and censure to explain its “not guilty” votes for history. It can state that the Senate’s “not guilty” votes do not constitute an exoneration of the president’s military aid actions concerning Ukraine. It can specifically say the Senate concludes the presidential conduct cited in the two articles of impeachment is to be condemned and censured.

And it can include something like this:

“While the Senate does not conclude that the President should be convicted of an impeachable crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Frankly, the idea isn’t mine alone. I borrowed the phrasing and the concept of linking the conduct with a statement of non-exoneration from a fellow who last March offered us this assurance:

“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” That  was good enough for Attorney General William Barr, in his summary of the Mueller report. It can work for us now.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

Today, we need to bring the late Fred Thompson back for a posthumous encore — to remind us how things really were, back before Americans discovered the proof that would cause the House Judiciary Committee to open its impeachment inquiry.

Frankly, in the summer of ’73, most Senate and House Republicans were thinking just as today’s Republicans think. They assumed their role was to prove there wasn’t any proof that Nixon was involved in the scandal that began when burglars with White House ties were caught bugging the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building.

The Watergate Committee began by doing things the right way. They hired staff counsels who questioned witnesses in closed sessions prior to their public hearings — the best way to discover evidence. In one private session, Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield reluctantly acknowledged that Nixon had a secret taping system. All Nixon’s meetings and phone calls were recorded and on file. Committee Democrats decided in their public hearing that the young Republican counsel would ask the bombshell question.

And with the whole world watching, Thompson asked: “Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?”

Butterfield answered: “I was aware of listening devices, yes sir.”

A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Nixon to surrender the tapes to the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment probe. The “Smoking Gun” tape, dated June 23, 1972, just six days after the botched burglary, was discovered. Nixon’s words, ordering the coverup, stunned us all. He wanted the CIA to tell the FBI to stop investigating the Watergate burglary — falsely claiming national security reasons.

Republican minds changed overnight. Nixon had to resign.

Fast-Forward: In 2015, Tea Party firebrand Rep. Trey Gowdy, (R-S.C.), used the same closed pre-hearing interview procedure to get info for his controversial Benghazi public hearings. Yep, the same practice that House Republicans are now blasting Democrats for using in their preliminary impeachment probe of President Trump.

“Our private hearing was much more constructive than the public hearing. Public hearings are a circus,” Gowdy told CBS “Face the Nation’s” Margaret Brennan last year. “It’s a freak show.”

All that is why, just a week ago, it was contemptible to see House Republican leaders convert the Capitol Dome into their own circus big top — and con TV viewers by staging a made-for-TV protest that created message imagery that was unforgettable, just untrue. We saw GOP chiefs leading dozens of House Republicans down a winding staircase into highly classified subterranean hearing chamber. We heard Republicans complaining Democrats denied them access to “Soviet-style … secret” hearings. But 48 Republicans on the House committees holding those hearings were allowed to attend. And this week, the full House approved the next phase: public hearings.

But House Democrats must also be faulted. In a stunning misjudgment, House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, (D-Calif.), opened a public hearing with a shameful comic parody, depicting Trump’s phone call with the Ukraine president as a gangster shakedown.

Schiff and all members of Congress need to rethink, recalibrate — and deep-six their partisan mindsets as they enter this somber impeachment process. We can help them now by recalling how the quest that began dramatically with Fred Thompson’s Senate Watergate Committee question climaxed a year later, on the House side of the Capitol.

On July 27, 1974 (when Adam Schiff was just 14), the House Judiciary Committee approved the first article of presidential impeachment in 151 years — the beginning of the end of Nixon’s presidency. Chairman Peter Rodino, (D-N.J.), a blue collar guy, quietly gaveled an adjournment, left the chamber, ignored reporters, even his staff (which included a bespectacled young aide named Hillary Rodham), walked into his office and phoned home. When his wife answered, the proud Italian-American patriot broke into tears and cried.

“I was keenly aware that we, Democrats and Republicans alike, had taken a momentous step in the political life (of) our nation,” Rodino later wrote. “To impeach a President is an awesome responsibility.”

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

On Thursday, President Trump’s chroniclers and critics looked up from their keyboards and saw on their news screens that reality was changing even faster than they could type. They saw a fighting-mad Trump, performing as the White House’s one-man impeachment war room, now brazenly saying and doing precisely what he’d long denied he ever did. They heard him pressuring Ukraine and China’s presidents to dig up political dirt on his leading 2020 Democratic campaign opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter.

Soon our news screens were filled with legal experts explaining why that was an impeachable crime. Even if there was no openly stated quid pro quo of what Trump will give these countries if they help him win re-election. Quid pro quos are rarely explicit and obvious, mostly implied and understood by all.

And — faster than you can say “Mueller who?” — House Democratic leaders seemed to be determined to act upon the new reality that was delivered to them, live on their news screens, by the president.

What we saw Thursday was hardly comparable to what we had witnessed back in the sweltering summer of 1974. President Nixon’s political demise had seemed to play out in stunning slow-motion on our television screens: The Supreme Court unanimously ordered Nixon to release his secretly recorded and transcribed conversations. Experts took forever, poring over the transcripts — until finally they discovered the meeting where we read Nixon’s own words as he planned the Watergate cover-up he had long denied even knowing about. Nixon was forced to resign in the face of certain House impeachment and Senate conviction.

But if that was Nixon’s impeachment smoking gun, what we just saw on our news screens Thursday seemed more like a fiery president who was morphing into his own impeachment flamethrower.

Trump was putting it all out there, in his own words — and he damn well wanted us all to hear what he was saying!

Just days earlier, Trump had ducked a question about what he really wanted Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to do about the Bidens. But, when asked again on Thursday, Trump surprisingly stopped ducking and answered:

“Well, I would think that if they were honest about it, they would start a major investigation into the Bidens. It’s a very simple answer. They should investigate the Bidens.”

Then Trump escalated his global quest for campaign help: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens. Because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.” Minutes earlier, when asked about his trade-and-tariff war with China, Trump had said: “I have lots of options on China, but if they don’t do what we want, we have tremendous power.”

Trump seemed proud to be showcasing his quid pro quo diplomacy. Also on Thursday, Trump’s newly resigned special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, told House impeachment investigators that he had warned Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani that he couldn’t trust info from Ukraine politicians about the Bidens or anything else. And House Democrats revealed a trove of texts in which mid-level Trump officials discussed their understanding that Trump made Ukraine probing of the Bidens a quid pro quo for receiving military aid to fight Russian-aided rebels.

In a Sept. 1 text, U.S. Charge d’Affairs to Ukraine Bill Taylor asks U.S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland: “Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting (between Trump and Zelenskiy) are conditioned on investigations (of the Bidens)?

Sondland, not wanting to text about such things, replies: “Call me.” And apparently they talked; because, on Sept. 9, Taylor again texted Sondland: “As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.”

Sondland, a Trump loyalist, texts for the record that “The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo of any kind.” And, of course, he adds: “I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.”

Got it. But Thursday, the Boss made the need for such text silence certifiably moot. Trump fired up his inner flamethrower and blasted it all out there, for all the world to see. No doubt there are a lot of singed eyebrows in Trump’s White House press corps, as my colleagues await their next enlightening newsbreak.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

So, reaching for his smartphone, Trump tweeted his joy to the world:

“All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited healthcare. How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!”

Basically, Trump is right. Of course this isn’t actually the end of the race. But Trump knows the people who are his base. They are about one-third of U.S. voters, blue-collar workers who once voted Democratic, but in 2016 they made him what he is today. And they’ll be furious to hear that, while they are paying for their family’s health care insurance, Democrats want illegal immigrants who broke our laws to get free health care.

Now, as 20-plus Democratic candidates — and another set of TV-journalist questioners — are prepping for a second round of debates later this month, it’s time for somebody to try to help them figure out how to sharpen their respective crafts. Here goes:

First, some thoughts for the interrogators (they’ll be from CNN this time): As MSNBC’s questioners showed us last month, we get nowhere when questioners ask tabloidy, made-for-TV photo-op questions that ask presidential candidates to perform like obedient preschoolers. As in: Please raise your hands, how many of you …

This becomes especially obvious when the questioner’s topic is complex and requires thoughtful consideration, not just campaign debate combat. Such as: How can we improve and safeguard our health care insurance?

Questioners need to ask questions that will permit each candidate to not just raise a hand, but raise a new solution, or discuss the plus-and-minus tradeoffs of old alternatives. In the difficult topic of health care treatment for undocumented immigrants, instead of that glib, tabloidy show-of-hands approach, why not ask candidates: What happens now when an uninsured undocumented (and thus illegal) immigrant in the United States becomes sick — say, has a heart attack? And what should our future policy be?

Undocumented immigrants presently cannot obtain coverage under Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), Medicare or Medicaid (in most states). So when they get sick, they go to hospital emergency rooms, where they must receive treatment — because doctors cannot tell them to go out, sit on the curb and die. So we all end up paying the bill — and that’s by far the most expensive form of treatment. (Pew Research Center estimates that of 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in America, as many as 6 million lack health insurance. Ka-ching!)

Hopefully, one presidential hopeful may know how things are really done now: Six states and Washington, D.C., allow Medicaid to cover illegal immigrants under age 18 (California just raised the age to 25) and 16 states cover low-income pregnant women, regardless of their immigration status.

While Trump has called for “American Citizens first!” it is uncertain whether he knows that under the Trump presidency, there are 1,400 federally funded health care centers in 11,000 urban, suburban and rural communities in all 50 states where people can get treatment, even if they are undocumented and destitute.

Hmmm, I also wonder if the leftiest and most devout democratic socialists know that Scandinavia’s socialist countries maintain tough restrictions on treating undocumented immigrants.

And while we are looking at all the failings we see on our TV screens, let me add one more. The only reason I know all this is that I just read most of it in a terrifically well-researched piece by The New York Times’ Jan Hoffman. But you probably didn’t see it and even Times regulars probably missed it — because the Times editors buried Hoffman’s piece on Page A15 on the 4th of July. So our 24/7 cable news talkers didn’t have time for it and we were all busy doing nothing on our holiday.

Maybe we’ll all learn together when the Democrats next debate at the end of this month. Let me see a show of hands: How many of you readers would like to hear your presidential hopefuls really discuss what they will do to safeguard your health care?

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

It came from the far-right ranks of the thinning, no-­longer Grand Old Party herd. It originated at the GOP’s favorite water­ing hole, Fox News Channel. And in truth, it wasn’t really the loud, leader-like trumpeting we’ve long associated with bull elephants. Indeed, it was more like the sound of plain old straight talk.

But it was at least a strong sound — and it conveyed a leader-like message. And that’s what stunned the congressional Republicans. Because what they heard Tuesday night was far more than the muffled mumbles and themeless nothingness they’d been hearing ever since a mysterious plague of leadership laryngitis hit their leaders long ago.

After President Trump had spent more than a week on a tweet tirade in which he accused the FBI of having placed a spy in his 2016 campaign, the president ordered Justice Department officials to give leading congressional Republicans a classified briefing last week on what the FBI had done. For days after that, none of the GOP leaders strongly defended the FBI’s actions.

But then the very conservative Rep. Trey Gowdy, who attended the classified Justice Department briefing, was interviewed on Fox.

“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump,” said Gowdy, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and is retiring after this year.

What Gowdy said was the sort of boilerplate Republican bromide that would have been considered a knee-jerk reflexive response at any other time in the last 50 years. Yet beginning on the day this 45th president was inaugurated, the congressional GOP’s leadership responsibility has fallen victim to Seinfeldian shrinkage. Senate Majority Leader­ Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan couldn’t even summon the fortitude to defend the FBI after the classified briefing. The best McConnell could do was to sort of speak in code, saying he’d heard “nothing particularly surprising.”

When it comes to fighting Democrats and fighting for Republicans, Gowdy is known to be as tough a Republican as has been invented. You remember him as the GOP’s chief pile-driver in the attacking House probe of Hillary Clinton’s handling of the tragedy at Benghazi. Who knew Gowdy also had a talent for subtlety?

“It looks to me like the FBI was doing what President Trump said … President Trump himself in the (fired FBI Director James) Comey memos said, ‘If anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it.’ Sounds to me like that was exactly what the FBI did.”

Just minutes after Gowdy’s interview aired on Fox, Trump appeared at a rally in Nashville, Tenn., and went aggressively on the attack. Without presenting a shred of proof, Trump accused Democrats of supporting the brutal Latin American immigrant gang known as MS-13. And, referring to the FBI probe and insisting he was the victim of FBI spying, Trump said: “How do you like the fact that they had people infiltrating our campaign?”

In a Capitol where the GOP’s best-known elites have shirked their leadership responsibilities, it’s good to see that at least the ever-battling Trey Gowdy hasn’t been Trumped.

Martin Schram is a syndicated columnist.

Republicans who once gleefully called Democrats soft on Russia, but now have developed political laryngitis, have spent the past year asking each other:

What’s the real reason President Trump has been so reluctant to combat with tough talk and actions Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attacks (from cyber to chemical weapons) against America and the West?

Does Putin have something on Trump? Something lurid? (Perhaps, but probably not it, since Trump seems unembarrassable.) Something financial?

Still, Republican congressional leaders and luminaries, and, in fact, all the rest of the capital cognoscenti, kept telling each other we’ll probably get the answers to all the above from special counsel Robert Mueller.

But maybe not. On Wednesday, The Washington Post exclusive reported that Mueller had informed Trump’s attorneys that, while he is continuing to investigate and Trump remains a subject of the investigation, the special counsel doesn’t consider the president to be a criminal target of the investigation.

That might seem like a mere nuance — but it rocked the capital city like an earthquake. Soon everyone was all a’Twitter. Talking heads were all over cable TV explaining that was lawyer-talk for saying there isn’t sufficient evidence — at least so far! — to bring any charges against Trump. And even talking heads figured they could calculate the math: No charges = no impeachment.

But again, maybe not. Because a smart special counsel might well be low-balling for now, depending on what his probers turn up. And lo, even as the heads were talking, special counsel’s apparatchiks were at a couple of private plane airports. CNN reported Mueller’s team stopped two private planes owned by Russian oligarchs and subpoenaed documents.

Rewind to noon Tuesday: In the White House Cabinet Room, Trump and leaders from three Baltic nations met the press. In his opening remarks, being Trump, the president rambled and wandered. His first 468 words were indeed about the Baltics. But he wandered into Mexico in his next 819 words, talking about a caravan of would-be immigrants wandering north from Honduras. (His guests seemed bewildered.)

Then came reporters’ questions. And after his obligatory riff on “crooked Hillary Clinton,” Trump emphasized one thing: “We’ve been very tough on Russia, frankly … nobody has been tougher on Russia.”

Trump Tough: After Russia’s chemical weapon assassination attempt in Britain, the U.S. expelled 60 Russian intelligence agents; so Russia expelled 60 U.S. agents. Then 30 countries expelled Russians and Russia expelled a like number of each country’s agents. Bottom line: Russia did something horrible; the U.S. and others didn’t — but all faced equal reprisals.

The U.S. pointedly didn’t follow Russia’s money — didn’t freeze the money Russian oligarchs (and probably Putin) have secreted in the U.S. and the West.

Just hours later, Trump’s freshly fired national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, made sure his last official appearance was an exercise in tough-truth-telling. McMaster outlined to the Atlantic Council’s diplomats “Russia’s so-called hybrid warfare, a pernicious form of aggression that combines political, economic, informational and cyber assaults against sovereign nations.”

And just hours after Trump’s boast about being tough on Russia, the three-star general declared: “So for too long some nations have looked the other way in the face of these threats. Russia brazenly and implausibly denies its actions. And we have failed to impose sufficient costs.”

That, most of all, is the point that should have led patriotic GOP leaders to be boldly and openly demanding that their party’s president must finally get tough with America’s attackers.

Americans of all political persuasions urgently require that you return to the White House — at once! You are being implored to undertake a new mission — one that is far more imperative than the joyful tax bill love-fest you performed for President Donald Trump just before Christmas.

That was a political celebration.

This must be a patriotic intervention.

You and you alone, as the leaders of your party, have the position and stature to take the action required to safeguard our United States homeland, to potentially save the lives of millions of people in South Korea and to preserve the fragile fabric of world peace. Those words are not being offered in a burst of hyperbole; they were typed with a carefully considered, realistic sense of urgency.

The president that your Republican Party nominated to lead our nation has spun perilously out of control. You have seen it. You know you are personally concerned. Indeed, you know you share the concerns that are privately being expressed by many of the most responsible Republican global policy experts in our country’s most famous conservative think tanks.

They have seen — and are very concerned about — the fact that President Trump has mounted, and then escalated, a campaign of taunting and goading North Korea’s famously unstable dictator. They know this is conduct that is both mindless and dangerous.

They also know Kim Jong Un is an immature and inexperienced leader who loves to brag that he not only possesses nuclear weapons but can deliver his nuclear-tipped warheads halfway around the world to our homeland.

Unfortunately, the entire world now realizes that what we are witnessing is a clash of nuclear-tipped leaders who really are two of kind. Trump, although he has been around the sun at least 30 times more than Kim, acts every bit as immature and inexperienced as the North Korean supreme leader. Like Kim, Trump loves to brag and also seems unbothered when his boasts laughably exceed the easily discovered truth. Both leaders clearly have a penchant for out-goading the other about nukes. And our planet’s future could be at stake.

On New Year’s Day, Kim bragged in a speech: “The United States can never fight a war against me and our state. It should properly know that the whole territory of the U.S. is within the range of our nuclear strike and a nuclear button is always on the desk of my office, and this is just a reality, not a threat.”

Just 12 minutes after Trump’s favorite Fox News channel reported Kim’s boast about his desktop “nuclear button,” the U.S. president shamelessly reverted to his inner pre-teen on a playground. He tweeted: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Never in the history of the United States has a president chosen to act so publicly in a way that is so juvenile, so reckless and perilous. And all responsible Republicans know their party now bears responsibility for having implored Americans to elect a president who risks the world’s safety to boast of America’s nuclear arsenal as a measure of his playground pre-manhood. Trump doesn’t seem to care if his taunts cause his adversary to flip out and angrily launch his first nuke.

Like the 1974 day when the conscience of conservatives, Sen. Barry Goldwater, led a delegation of Republicans to the White House and told President Richard Nixon he must resign or be impeached and convicted for his Watergate crimes, so too all of the 2018 Republican congressional leaders know, deep down, what they must do.

They must go to the White House, and confront Trump as a sizable group with a 2018 ultimatum that puts patriotism ahead of politics. Tell Trump he must end his reckless, immature and globally perilous practices once and for all — or his fellow Republicans will begin a process to remove him for conduct unbefitting a U.S. president that constitutes a clear and present danger to us all.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

Really. And to prove that’s true, we will violate (just this once!) the clickbait commandment that religiously rules our news biz these days. We’re targeting today’s column as must-reading for just 52 people — the Republican members of the U.S. Senate. We are doing that because they urgently need to understand the real significance of what they have just been asked to do. So we are here to help.

“Repeal of Health Mandate Will Be Added to Tax Plan,” reported The New York Times headline spread across the top right corner of Wednesday’s front page. The Senate’s Republican leaders are trying to lure conservative senators to vote for a mammoth rewriting of federal tax — so they have just added a conservative sweetener.

With a parliamentary wink and an elbow in the ribs, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is giving fellow conservatives some sweet health care candy they’d given up hopes of ever getting — a chance to repeal (at long last!) the Affordable Care Act provision that conservatives have long loved to denounce as Obamacare’s most liberal (translation: very bad) requirement. Yes, ACA’s mandate that individuals must obtain health insurance.

If conservatives vote yes on the comprehensive tax bill — they can make the health insurance mandate disappear. And Obamacare will be in shambles. Conservatives will get a Republican revenge. And President Donald Trump will get a win (which is all he wants, no matter what havoc it creates).

But to properly tell this truth for our 52 targeted Senate Republican readers — since they have only a few days to decide how to vote on this now doubly-complex tax/health care bill — we must first remove all the labels. Why? Because that’s the only way to show that nothing that is about to happen makes any sense at all.

But it will begin to make sense when I tell you about the day I first discovered that health care mandate idea that conservatives love to vilify.

It was March 1992, and at one of Washington’s most respected think tanks, experts handed me their new health care plan: “The Consumer Choice Approach.” It promised that there was a reasonable, market-based way to provide all Americans with health insurance — including those with pre-existing conditions (the most costly to cover). This was the key, the plan said: “Require all households to purchase at least a basic package of insurance, unless they are covered by Medicaid, Medicare, or other government health programs.” The plan added that a “refundable credit system partially would offset the cost of such a plan for most Americans.”

The think tank I was inside was the conservative, highly respected Heritage Foundation, reading, “The Heritage Consumer Choice Health Plan.” Republicans, being a party of big ideas, were focused on preventing U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) from enacting his liberal single-payer health care plan. So they came up with this market-based plan.

The section titled “Advantages of the Heritage Plan,” promised: “Every American family would have access to affordable and adequate health care. … Americans no longer would lose coverage when they changed jobs. … Costs would be controlled effectively and efficiently. … The Heritage plan is budget neutral.”

It seemed like such a smart conservative idea that, in Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Mitt Romney made the heath care mandate the basis of his Romneycare. And years later, in Washington, a president picked the same mandate as the common-sense basis of his health care plan. He figured that compromise would attract Republican support. But we know how that turned out. Instead, Republicans rushed to ridicule the president’s plan by derisively naming it “Obamacare.” And so it goes.

Now Senate Republican leaders just made their huge, complex tax rewrite way huger by recklessly tossing some conservative candy in the form of a reckless Obamacare mandate repeal.

Too bad Washington isn’t a No Labels city. Imagine our capital being a place where things work — and even make sense.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Talk back at letterstoeditor@bostonherald.com.

Yet, make no mistake, the remake is real. It is a rework-in-progress. And it wasn’t detected until the politicos felt it happening in Tuesday’s election.

The political earth moved for the Democrats, most climactically. And that shook the Republicans, most distressingly, as Democrats won, in scattered races everywhere the off-year elections were held:

In Virginia, Democrat Ralph Northam was elected governor with a 9 percentage point margin that was the party’s biggest in 32 years. Virginia’s Democrats triumphed all the way down the ballot, including flipping 14 GOP-held state house seats. In New Jersey, where Democrat Phil Murphy’s unsurprising win ended the era of the unpopular Republican Gov. Chris Christie. Even in reliably Republican Georgia, Democrats captured three GOP-held state house seats.

No wonder the 2017 electoral aftershocks are the topic of shattering priority (bordering on semi-panic, for some) inside every Republican inner sanctum.

The quick-and-easy TV punditry made the obvious perfectly clear: Independents and even Republicans nationwide were rebelling against President Trump’s combative, untruthful and bullying ways. Indeed, Virginia’s voter exit polls showed that 57 percent of those voting disapproved of how Trump is performing his job; and unsurprisingly, Democrat Northam received 87 percent of those votes. Ed Gillespie, a longtime Republican strategist and lobbyist, won the votes of almost all of the 40 percent who said they approved of Trump’s job performance. But exit polls cannot measure the views of those stayed home because they are turned off by Trump’s unpresidential conduct.

Time out for a personal observation: I’ve known Ed Gillespie for decades and always found him to be a straightforward and personable pol. But I was astounded at the bizarre, and reprehensible way Gillespie closed out his campaign. He chose a Trump-styled appeal emphasizing conservative base-driving, non-substantive issues (for example, not removing Virginia’s Confederacy statues). And his TV ads included a fear-and-smear demagoguery ad aimed at scaring Virginians by claiming Northam favored restoring the rights of a man convicted of child pornography charges. But Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s program, which Northam backed, restored rights to voting, serving on juries and obtaining firearms. Left unsaid was that Gillespie, in his responsible past, also favored restoring rights of convicted felons.

Virginians surprised me. After newspaper editorials blasted his ads, Gillespie wound up losing many college-educated voters, especially suburban white women who last year voted for Trump.

But Virginia’s exit polls also revealed a most significant lesson for nationwide Republicans (even though it was overlooked by pols and pundits). While strategists push their negative attack ads, we just learned that people really care most about the things that affect their families most. (Repeat in unison: Duh!)

When exit pollsters asked people which of five issues mattered most, Virginians overwhelmingly named only one — health care. It scored 39 percent; all others (gun policy, taxes, immigration, and abortion) scored in the teens or lower.

Most importantly: 77 percent of those listing health care as most important in their choice then voted for Democrat Northam. Only 23 percent who cited health care voted for Gillespie.

This tells us that the real blame for Tuesday’s Republican defeats is more than just disgust with Trump’s presidency. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and the entire GOP congressional leadership must share the blame — because they failed to protect Americans’ health insurance. Voters realize every idea the GOP leaders pushed in the guise of repealing and replacing Obamacare would cause millions of middle-class families to lose their health insurance, independent analysts said.

America’s working-class families — including Trump’s Republican voter base — saw their GOP leaders playing partisan politics rather than working with Democrats to fix Obamacare’s flaws and saving what works best.

Tuesday’s real message for Republicans was unmistakable: Their own working class base fears losing their health insurance security. Yet, when it came to safeguarding the security fears of their own hard-working Americans, the once-Grand Old Party has shown it is no longer grand, nor even good. The GOP leaders don’t care — and the people get it.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

It is matched by the silence of the GOP’s lambs, the once-heralded freshmen flock who, it turns out, are just sheep.

Noiseless nothingness has been their only combined response to speeches by four prominent Republicans who warned us about the unpresidential unfitness of President Donald Trump.

News-watching historians might have assumed (according to normal arcs of history) that any such cluster of powerful speeches would ignite a party revolution. But not in this party.

Also, you might have assumed the Democrats would take swift advantage of this uncivil Republican war, sound new themes and begin their political comeback. But not that party. At least not yet. Even though we’ve just seen a new promising path savvy Democrats should pursue. More on that later.

But we must begin by exploring how and why this odd epidemic of political laryngitis muted today’s congressional Republicans — after their prominent pals bluntly warned them of the president’s unpresidential conduct.

First, the Trump critics were end-of-the-line Republicans whose futures are all past, no prologue. They have no residual clout: Ex-president George W. Bush; ex-presidential nominee John McCain, now battling terminal brain cancer; retiring (fed-up!) Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker; and retiring freshman (who saw he’d be defeated by his well-financed primary opponent) Sen. Jeff Flake. They separately warned us Trump is dangerously uninformed, has dangerously goaded North Korea’s nuke-boasting Kim Jong Un, willfully lies, willfully divides, willfully inflames, and so forth.

Second, every Republican in Congress knows Trump is combative and never lets an attack go unavenged. Third, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan head a rare phylum of political invertebrates. They mainly fear ending up like Jeff Flake — facing a powerfully financed primary challenger.

Meanwhile, the clamor of all that Republican silence was hardly disturbed by a newsbreak on Tuesday. Even though it turned out to be news that Democrats need to make a central theme of their recovery. For it should help them regain the trust — and votes! — of blue-collar, middle-class workers who were formerly Democrats but voted for Trump (or against Hillary) in 2016.

With Vice President Mike Pence voting to break a 50-50 tie, the Senate voted to scrap a major new rule that permitted millions of Americans to unite in class-action lawsuits against big banks and other financial institutions. The rule was a major initiative of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, established by Congress during Barack Obama’s presidency to help ordinary people combat aggressive and harassing actions in the wake of widespread mortgage abuses. The House had already approved the same measure in July, and Trump is expected to quickly sign it into law, forcing millions of middle-class homeowners back into private arbitration, which banks greatly prefer.

Oddly, the news was covered most unevenly. It was barely mentioned by 24/7 cable news networks. Wednesday’s Washington Post reported it in a small, eight-paragraph article at the bottom of page A15. But The New York Times recognized it as big front page news, with this headline atop column one: “Sparing Banks, Senate Repeals Litigation Rule.” The Times reported:

“ ‘Tonight’s vote is a giant setback for every consumer in this country,’ Richard Cordray, the director of the consumer bureau, said. ‘As a result, companies like Wells Fargo and Equifax remain free to break the law without fear of legal blowback from their customers.’ Added Sen. Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio: ‘By voting to take rights away from customers, the Senate voted tonight to side with Wells Fargo lobbyists over the people we serve.’ ”

But so far, few Democrats have been at the cutting edge of making this case. An online search turned up one who is — Florida’s Democratic candidate for attorney general, Ryan Torrens.

A Tampa attorney, Torrens specializes in consumer protection law and announced his candidacy on public property in front of a Wells Fargo Bank. Last June, the Tampa Bay Times reported Torrens won a foreclosure reversal for the family of Luis and Tina Lopez, who lost their home after a misunderstanding that began with a mere $150 home-owner’s association fee.

Locally and in Washington, Democrats need to seize the significance of this week’s big break for bankers and once again let voters see them fighting for middle-class workers who were victimized by big banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions.

Only then will the Trump voters who need help remember it’s the Democrats who will champion their cause.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

But maddeningly, America has not yet realized that this worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history was enabled by actions (and unforgivable inactions!) of 60 Americans 2,000 miles to the east.

So, we must also focus on the names of those other Americans, who unintentionally became the gunman’s ultimate enablers. They are 45 Republican and 15 Democratic U.S. senators who voted in 2013 to defeat a comprehensive gun control bill that would have prevented the Las Vegas murderer, Stephen Paddock, from legally turning his assault weapons into super-firing de facto machine guns. The group created a legal loophole and never went back to close it.

So let me start introducing you to the senators who ended up becoming a mass murderer’s unwitting enablers. Lest you feel overwhelmed, we’ll present them alphabetically, in several small batches. Among the senators who defeated the 2013 gun bill, creating a legal loophole they forgot about, were:

U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Dan Coats (R-Ind.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho),Ted Cruz, R-Texas), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.).

That bill, introduced by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was widely known as an assault weapons ban. But it also would have outlawed the modification devices called “bump stocks” that Paddock used to create his de facto machine guns.

Back in 2013, America’s gun culture knew all about bump stocks. A company named Slide Fire began manufacturing the modification. “Guns and Ammo” extolled its rapid fire virtues in a website video. And the Associated Press explained how it could convert a belt-fed rifle into a veritable machine gun, legally. It used the gun’s natural recoil force to bump the trigger into machine-gun speed, firing up to 800 rounds a minute.

That apparently didn’t alarm the rest of our select group of senators:

U.S. Sens. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Angus King (I-Maine), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

In 2013, Feinstein’s press office released a summary of her bill, explaining it would specifically ban “dangerous aftermarket modifications and workarounds,” including, “Bump or slide fire stocks, which are modified stocks that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire at rates similar to fully automatic machine guns.”

Also opposed: U.S. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), James Risch (R-Idaho), Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), Jon Tester (D-Mont.), John Thune (R-S.D.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), David Vitter (R-La.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Roger Wicker (R-Miss).

It is inconceivable all the senators who opposed the assault ban really thought it was fine to allow individuals to retrofit firearms to create a de facto machine gun. They knew actual machine guns are banned because they are just machines for mass killing. Yet, they were so afraid of opposing the National Rifle Association that they were content to walk away after creating a loophole only a gun lobbyist could love.

This Wednesday, Feinstein tried yet again. She introduced a new bill to simply ban bump stock modification devices. “The only reason to modify a gun is to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible,” she told reporters.

But wait. McConnell, the Republican whose title is “leader,” has already taken a position — he’s against taking any position. “It’s premature to be discussing legislative solutions, if there are any,” he said.

Get the hook.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

All around the planet, people saw how ordinary Americans live and get by on the streets of their ordinary American suburbs. And no, we’re not talking here about the stereotypes: No smiling suburbanites watering their lawns and waving as neighbors cruise by in fancy front-, rear-, and all-wheel drive SUVs.

We are talking about no-wheel drive vehicles — boats — cruising on suburban streets. For this week, the world got to know ordinary American suburbanites trapped in waist-deep water, frantically waving for help at strangers in scruffy boats that were the most beautiful sight to stranded, desperate eyes.

The world watched news showing strangers helping strangers, saving the lives of whole families, elders, and invalids, hauling them into their small boats. It was a sight people around the planet might not have expected to see after the mind-numbing election campaigns that featured hate-fueled, race-defined politics and politicians yammering about illegals who murder, rape, steal and deal drugs. The world saw a long campaign that convinced many Americans our porous Mexican border was a floodgate — and the flood of illegals was the cause of much that is wrong in America. But a hurricane named Harvey just reminded Texas and all the nation about the hell a real flood can inflict.

And now South Texas has reminded the world about all that really remains strong and good in America’s core.

With the whole world watching, Americans in little, life-giving boats clearly didn’t give a damn whether the hand they were grasping, or body they were lifting, was white, black, brown, or yellow. Nobody was racially profiling or checking for photo IDs, or green cards, or asking whether the person they were saving was a D-voter, or R-voter, or hell-no voter.

Just the week before, the world had seen a very different America — the worst of America — in the news coverage of racial hatred and violence that descended upon Charlottesville.

This week, in rising to meet Harvey’s challenge, Texas showcased America at its best. And in covering the tragedy, the news media at times did too.

BREAKING NEWS: In Beaumont, Texas, CNN’s Drew Griffin is doing a live standup on the grassy bank of a ravine that, after more than 50 inches of torrential rain, has suddenly become a river. Over the shoulder of his bright red CNN rain jacket, viewers see a white pickup truck floating helplessly down the rapidly flowing neo-river. The driver, who later gave his name as Jerry Summerall, had assumed that the water-filled ravine was a mildly submerged road — and turned right into it. The cab was filling up and the instant-river was seemingly sweeping Summerall to his demise.

Carrying his live mic, Griffin starts running alongside the floating truck. His crew gets a rope, holds one end and tosses the other to the driver. Got it. As Summerall holds on for dear life, Griffin and his crew pull him out his window, through the water. Soon we see this ordinary guy, just another overweight, balding, bespectacled guy who, on this day, is also maybe the luckiest guy on earth — on all fours, on the grassy bank, with the CNN crew that saved his life. In the distance, Griffin says he can see just the white top of Jerry’s doomed pickup that might have become his tomb.

That wasn’t “fake news,” President Donald Trump’s bullying term he especially loves to spit at CNN. And that damn well wasn’t “the enemy of America” — which is Trump’s vile new shorthand for journalists.

It was just one ordinary real American saving the life of a fellow American. A working guy on his job rescuing a working guy in a flooding pickup. It was America saving America. It is who we are and what we do.

And that is what the world saw this week, deep in the heart of Texas.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

An assassination, in fact — of a journalist, or perhaps even a cluster of journalists, who are increasingly in danger of becoming targets of convenience simply for doing their jobs, covering the president of the United States.

Because America’s 45th president is also America’s first chief executive who has transformed his presidency into an ever-escalating campaign of vitriolic anti-journalist tirades. It now seems obvious that, sooner or later, Trump’s torrent of hateful invectives and flat-out falsehoods will inevitably incite some wrongheaded individual into falling for Trump’s sick lie that the news media is America’s enemy. After all, thousands of his faithful supporters have been cheering his favorite anti-news media attack lines every time Trump, clearly battling his latest wave of defensiveness, opts to veer off-script.

And Tuesday night, at a huge rally in Phoenix, the president apparently reached his defensive pique, after days of being attacked ever since his initial unwillingness to condemn by name the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. He careened into a massive anti-media tirade that lasted at least 16 minutes as he cycled and recycled through his litany of attack lines as never before.

“These are really, really dishonest people, and they’re bad people, and I really think they don’t like our country,” Trump said, pointing at the White House press corps and especially the TV cameras. And later: “I’m really doing this to show you how damned dishonest these people are.”

Trump worked even-handedly to be abusive and unfair to all the president’s press corps. He attacked “the failing New York Times, which is like so bad” and then attacked “The Washington Post, which I call a lobbying tool for Amazon, OK, that’s a lobbying tool for Amazon.” Of course he lashed out at “CNN, which is so bad and so pathetic and their ratings are going down” — and that cued his rally faithful to begin chanting: “CNN sucks! CNN sucks!”

So Trump sought to spread his venom more evenly: “I mean CNN is really bad, but ABC this morning — I don’t watch it much, but I’m watching in the morning and they have little George Stephanopoulos talking to (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) Nikki Haley, right? Little George.” And Trump puts his hand, down palm down, to hip level to show his impression of the ABC anchor’s stature.

Later, he was back to ecumenically questioning the patriotism of the entire press corps: “These are sick people. You know the thing I don’t understand? … You would think they’d want to make our country great again. And I honestly believe they don’t. … If you want to discover the source of the division in our country, look no further than the fake news and the crooked media, which would rather get ratings and clicks than tell the truth.”

In decades of covering American presidents, I have observed Republicans and Democrats with strong convictions and impressive statures. But I have never seen a president who frequently seems to become massively unhinged in the way that has become Trump’s normalcy.

Tuesday night, on CNN, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said of Trump: “I really question . . . his fitness to be in this office.” He added that, “worry about” the fact that as president, Trump has “access to nuclear codes” for launching a nuclear attack.

That is a problem Official Washington has been privately whispering about for months now. And indeed, Trump’s fitness for office is of frightening concern for us all.

But I also have a concern for the safety of my news media colleagues — because I am convinced that even this out-of-control bully-at-the-presidential-sealed-pulpit doesn’t fathom the inevitable sinister consequences of his own words.

Amber Alert: The Republican Party’s senior leaders in Congress must limo down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where they will be joined by the president’s own cabinet. And speaking with a unity that will be a new experience for their once-Grand Old Party, they must tell their president that his newly perilous anti-media tirades must stop.

I don’t believe that Trump, even at his worst, wants to be responsible for triggering an assassination, let alone a massacre.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

Retired four-star Marine General John Kelly, just six months into his first post-military tour of duty, relinquished his Homeland Security secretary title, raised his right hand and was officially sworn into his new job as President Donald Trump’s chief of staff.

It was a compact ceremony, witnessed by a handful of attendees who included a glum-faced Anthony Scaramucci, who seemed nothing like his famously swaggering self. Trump’s hand-picked, brand-new communications director had just spent the weekend making himself Team Trump’s most famously outspoken (see also: famously obscene) newsmaker. Now Scaramucci was un-ceremonially sandwiched between journalists holding boom mics and so busy they were actually ignoring him. But not for long.

Just hours later, Scaramucci was huge news again. Suddenly, the man known on Wall Street as “The Mooch,” was back on the street — fired.

Gen. Kelly had quickly captured the high ground — and those who have long known and admired Kelly instantly understood why. Surely Scaramucci’s foul-mouthed, judgment-impaired self-promoting ways would violate everything Kelly has stood for and everything he needs to impose order in the West Wing.

Those who know Kelly well understand why he turned down Trump’s earlier efforts to get him to accept this top White House job. They know Kelly disapproved of things Trump had done. It was more than just the crude things. When Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Kelly reportedly considered resigning.

Kelly’s admirers are convinced he now took the job because America and the world have plunged into heightened volatility. North Korea poses a genuine nuclear threat. Russia has recycled its Cold War hostilities. The Republican Congress has gridlocked itself. Kelly concluded he couldn’t turn his back on his country now.

Yet in his first week on the job, Trump’s top general has witnessed some problematic things that may be beyond his ability to resolve.

For instance, Trump lies. He lies about things large and small, as if he cannot help himself. This week, Kelly learned from media reports that it was Trump who insisted his son Donald Jr. reject transparency and issue his initially deceptive description of his transition meeting in Trump Tower with a government-linked Russian lawyer. So Donald Jr.’s first report omitted saying he’d been promised he’d get Russian government material damaging to Democratic 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. And he conveniently didn’t mention Trump’s son-in-law and campaign manager attending the meeting.

Also this week, Kelly discovered that spokespeople for both Mexico’s president and the head of America’s Boy Scouts were separately denying Trump’s boasts that both men had phoned Trump to praise him. Trump had said Mexico’s president praised him for reducing Mexican immigration; and that the Scouts’ head praised his speech as great. Spokespeople for both said there were no phone calls at all. The Scouts organization actually apologized because Trump’s talk was improperly political — something presidents have never done.

Kelly may also have a better understanding that his greatest future problem may stem from a concern he has tried not to dwell on — but which may plunge the president into a future crisis: The general who spent his last six months securing America’s homeland knows his commander in chief remains unwilling to admit Russia launched cyberattacks on America’s homeland in 2016 — and that U.S. intelligence chiefs agree President Vladimir Putin gave the order. Yet Trump still sometimes voices doubts that Putin or Russia were behind the campaign leaks of stolen emails in a bid to help Trump defeat Clinton. (I’m convinced Trump would have won without Russia’s help; but unlike Trump, I accept the conclusions of the CIA, NSA, FBI and national intelligence director.)

Having captured the high ground, the general may find himself surrounded by quicksand. Kelly may soon realize his biggest problem may begin with the reason behind Trump’s sleepless, reckless 4 a.m. tweeting. Trump is making himself appear obsessed with the possibility that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe may extend into decades of investments by Russian oligarchs into Trump real estate ventures. It could lead to questions of possible conflicts of interest and perhaps the laundering of money from questionable Russian sources.

Kelly may soon wonder if his decision to fulfill his patriotic duty to his country has landed him a leading role in Mission Impossible.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.

Once again, the famous talking heads of what has become the We’re-Not-Trump Party find themselves sipping for solace at political wakes and solemnly sitting Southern-fried Shiva. Democrats have shifted into auto-grieve, rolling through their rituals of ducking the blame, passing the buck and ignoring the reality that is increasingly obvious. In Georgia, especially, the Democrats had plenty of money to spend but no compelling idea that could make their cause a crusade.

America’s once-dominant working people’s party seems stuck with a fleet of bandwagons with jammed people-gears. So today we’re focusing on what Democrats must do to win back the people who were theirs — starting with the party’s finest asset, its loyal, true-believing supporters.

Faithful Democrats will never forget the pride and thrill they felt when President Barack Obama passionately presented his plan for fixing what we all now know isn’t working in his Affordable Care Act. Regrettably, the reason faithful Democrats (and millions of others) will never be able to forget that epic moment of Obama leadership is that, unfortunately, it never happened.

And that’s too bad, because the Democratic faithful — and also millions of blue-collar working men and women who voted for Donald Trump — would have appreciated Obama’s determination to actually fix Obamacare. It could have inspired them to want to stand, fight and win again.

Of course, Team Obama’s grads will want you to know that such an effort would have been used against them by Republicans to try to repeal Obamacare. That’s true. But then again, House Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare more than 50 times as it was.

Sometimes, political fights cannot be ducked and dodged; sometimes, they must be fought and won.

For most of Obama’s two terms — and especially during the 2016 presidential campaign — Republicans needed to be exposed for fighting to replace something that has brought health insurance to millions with nothing. Instead, the GOP won bigtime in 2016 because Democrats couldn’t convince voters they would be worse off with any alternative Republicans were talking about.

Finally, this year, Republicans, now controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, had to produce alternatives — and so far that has helped the Democrats in ways Democrats couldn’t do for themselves. The U.S. House Republicans’ replacement for Obamacare turned out to be a political disaster. Analyses showed it would hurt Trump’s voter base (blue-collar working families) most of all. It would deprive millions of insurance they got under Obamacare. and could make insurance unaffordable or unattainable for those with previous health problems.

Here are two polar-opposite political assessments of the original House GOP bill:

* On May 4, buses rolled up the White House driveway bringing House Republicans to a Rose Garden ceremony, where President Donald Trump gushed that “it’s a great plan.”

* On May 13, Trump threw all of those same House Republicans under their buses by telling Republican senators at a White House luncheon that the House GOP bill was actually “mean.”

This week, Trump reportedly told tech industry execs the Senate version will have “more heart.” And meanwhile, the Senate’s GOP leaders, working so secretly that even their GOP Senate colleagues were shut out as if they were lowly journalists, finally rolled out their attempt at a kinder, gentler plan. And the debate will become Republicans vs. Republicans.

But that debate will lack the people-driven heart and soul that was long the Democrats’ specialty.

So Citizen Obama, please consider a brief return to the front lines. Not as a fighter but as Inspirer-in-Chief — with perhaps something more than Thursday’s extended Facebook posting.

Just by lending your expertise and gravitas, you may be able to imaginatively (and substantively) inspire your leader-lite party to fight for working people who are about to be shafted by the GOP plan.

Perhaps you can inspire the sort of truly bipartisan compromise that can finally fix the flaws you know exist in Obamacare. Perhaps you may be able to make the difference that can assure your legacy — and our life-saving health insurance! — will endure.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Talk back at letterstoeditor@bostonherald.com.

No, Mexico didn’t pay for it; it’s not that wall. But Trump got the wall he really needed most — a rock-solid stonewall, built for him Tuesday by Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, who was the first (and for most of the campaign the only) U.S. senator to endorse Trump. Sessions was rewarded by becoming Trump’s attorney general; but it’s a reward that hasn’t always seemed so rewarding.

On Tuesday, Sessions raised his right hand and swore to tell the Senate Intelligence Committee the whole truth — but then mainly gave sworn non-testimony. Sessions stonewalled questions about him and Trump discussing contacts with Russia before, during or after Russia attacked America’s democracy with cyber weapons. He also rebuffed queries about why Trump really fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating all the above.

Sessions seems to have stonewalled the senators with two purposes:

(1) to loyally protect his boss; and

(2) in a desperate bid to save his own job (see 1).

Here’s the background: Trump has reportedly been furious ever since Sessions recused himself from any role in the FBI’s Russia probe on the legally commonsense grounds that, since he was the chairman of the Trump campaign’s national security operation, he shouldn’t oversee or have any role in an investigation of himself. Trump apparently couldn’t understand that.

So in the days before this week’s hearing, Trump calculatedly manipulated Sessions with the skill of a fine puppeteer. Trump has always liked to publicly proclaim that he is all about loyalty. But ultimately (as his chief of staff Reince Priebus, press secretary Sean Spicer and others have discovered), Trump is mainly all about Trump.

Day after day, prior to Sessions’ Senate appearance, Trump coldly refused to say (and ordered his spokespeople to refuse to say) whether he still had confidence in Sessions as his attorney general. It was an act of presidential spanksmanship that went far beyond anything Washington, D.C., has seen in the modern era.

Day after day, Sessions endured his embarrassment. Sessions reportedly offered to resign; Trump didn’t accept that. He had other plans. And on testimony day, Sessions sought to prove his loyalty by building Trump’s wall, stone by stone.

The well-orchestrated performance allowed Trump to avoid looking guilty of whatever by having to claim executive privilege to stop Sessions from testifying to anything the two of them might have discussed about this Russia thing. Or whether — as Trump himself bizarrely confessed publicly — the real reason Trump fired the FBI chief was because he insisted on pursuing Team Trump’s Russia connections. So it really wasn’t because Comey blundered in his handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails, including when he publicly reopened the probe in the final days of the campaign, a move that surely helped Trump become president.

Sessions stonewalled. He flat-out refused to answer any questions about what he and Trump discussed — even though Trump wasn’t claiming executive privilege. Sessions just said he wanted to preserve his president’s right to later declare executive privilege. Democrats, apparently surprised by Sessions’ obvious ploy, could only howl at that parliamentary moon.

Sessions simply denied he was doing what he was doing: “I am not stonewalling. I am following the historic policies of the Department of Justice.” None of which he could cite.

Here’s how mind-boggling things got: At one point, Sessions insisted he had no information about contacts Trump’s fired national security adviser Michael Flynn had with Russians — when the whole world has seen that video of Flynn happily sitting beside Vladimir Putin at a Moscow banquet the Russians paid Flynn to attend.

Finally, it seems Alabama’s proud son may have earned the right to stay on as Trump’s attorney general. Loyal is as loyal does.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Talk back at letterstoeditor@bostonherald.com.

But this was 2017, not 1972.

And the art of this deal was cutting out middle men entirely. This time, the artful deal-master, President Trump, chose to do all the deal-making himself.

And that is one big difference between the stunning, detailed revelations fired FBI Director James Comey made this week regarding his one-on-one conversations with Trump and the famously named “smoking gun” Oval Office conversation that was the unmaking of the 37th president, Richard M. Nixon.

It was 45 years ago this month that Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, plotted to get the CIA to tell the FBI to halt its investigation of the Watergate break-in and bugging by falsely claiming it would blow the cover on a national security secret. In contrast, Comey contended in a statement released Wednesday and in his Senate Intelligence Committee hearing testimony Thursday, Trump chose to personally convince his then-FBI chief to end his probe of Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. And Trump repeatedly prodded Comey to say publicly that Trump wasn’t an FBI investigation target.

But, of course, there is one other huge difference between Comey’s disclosures and the “smoking gun” revelations. Nixon’s cover-up was recorded for posterity by the president’s own automatic taping system.

On June 23, 1972, midway through a re-election campaign Nixon was leading by a wide margin, Haldeman walked into the Oval Office and broke some bad news. And two years later, we eavesdropped as Haldeman told his boss: “Now, on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back to the … problem area because the FBI is not under control.”

The FBI had just traced money that was paid to the Cuban-American Watergate burglars, who had been caught in the act. They were paid, in part, with a $25,000 check that had been donated to Nixon’s re-election campaign.

“The way to handle this now,” Haldeman said, “is for us to have [CIA Deputy Director Vernon] Walters call [FBI Director] Pat Gray and just say, ‘Stay the hell out of this … we don’t want you to go any further on it.’

“Good deal! Play it tough,” Nixon said.

Comey has no audio tapes to play for us — but he prays Trump does. “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” he said Thursday. (Trump’s White House coyly won’t say if any tapes exist.) So far, we only have Comey’s cringe-worthy accounts of several instances when, he says, Trump tried to co-opt him.

Comey recounts a painfully awkward Jan. 27 dinner, just the two men alone at a table in the White House mansion’s Green Room. Comey said Trump began “an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship.” He wrote that “the president said, ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.’ I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence.” (Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz insisted yesterday his client never said that.)

On Feb. 14, after an Oval Office meeting attended by six top officials, Trump asked only Comey to remain. “I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” Trump said when they were alone. “ ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.’ I replied only that ‘he is a good guy.’ ”

Comey recounted Trump’s repeated efforts to get the FBI to make public the fact that he is not personally under investigation. Comey, in effect, kept passing that buck up to the acting deputy attorney general to decide. No doubt that infuriated Trump.

If Comey’s account proves accurate, Trump’s efforts to get the Flynn investigation halted could possibly be considered an effort to obstruct justice. But since he always couched it in terms of human compassion, and never issued a direct order, that obstruction finding is far from certain.

Nixon was undone by his own smoking gun. Trump must now coexist with Comey’s smoldering (but not smoking) revelations. It promises to be, at the very best, a coexistence as chilly, unsettling and unpresidential as his bizarre dinner in the Green Room.

Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive.