There must be a special place in hell for the gatekeepers — with a special circle for the Washington gatekeepers. These nonentities man the gates in Washington and, by design or simple obduracy, pervert the purposes of government.

They also fuel the lobbying industry. The name of that game is “access” and it is sold openly. If you have worked on Capitol Hill or in a cabinet secretary’s office, bingo! You have access.

Chances are the general public, journalists or others who need to speak to the principals, whether elected or appointed, will not get a look in because of the gatekeepers: those busybodies who take it upon themselves to affect things by blocking messages or meetings.

In Washington at present, the gatekeepers have more power than I have seen in 50 years. You have the constitutional right to petition your elected and appointed officials. But that right is abrogated if you cannot get through the door.

That is where the lobbyists come in; they can get through the door and influence the principals.

None of this is new, but there is a new dimension. Time was when you could get into federal buildings and walk around. That meant you had a chance of literally bumping into people you might want to buttonhole. Now surly guards demand appointments and IDs. A chance encounter with an assistant secretary is no longer in the cards.

There are channels that are harder for the new face to navigate than for those who have “access.” As most of us do not have this means of entry, we must settle for not being heard or getting routine rejection from the staffer manning the gate.

I have never known a time when the bureaucracy was so indifferent to the public when it comes to access. If a reporter does not cover a particular department regularly, your request for an interview will be sidelined or ignored. And if you represent a publication that does not have the weight of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you will be dismissed.

Friends of mine work who for a charity dealing with a terrible and under-reported disease, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, have found the gatekeepers not only unhelpful but obstructionist at the Department of Health and Human Services and its agency, the National Institutes of Health.

When I managed reporters in Washington, I urged them to find ingenious ways around the gatekeepers, such as riding back and forth on the subway that carries members from the Capitol to their office buildings. Eventually, you would have a word with a congressman. And, surprise, surprise, he or she would be happy to oblige, unaware of the barriers erected around them by their gatekeepers. I have known senators who would sit in their offices hoping to see a new face, while their staffers turned them away.

Unfortunately, the phenomenon of out-of-control gatekeeping is not confined to the government and Congress. It is now rampant throughout society.

But it is the isolation of government from the people that is damaging and pernicious. It is that which creates and feeds the wrongs of lobbying and establishes the power of the elites.

Officialdom knows that saying “no” has more power than saying “yes.” The gatekeepers, who decide who should be heard and who should be denied, have always been with us. Witness the courts of Europe.

To get around the Washington gatekeepers, here are some extreme measures:

• Get a home address for the person you want to talk to — there are many services that will sell you armfuls of personal information, including home address and telephone numbers.

• Join the person’s church — public piety is in.

• Go wild on social media — shame the person.

You could, I suppose, try sending a drone with a message through the window of the unfortunate one you have been denied access to. But I would not advise that, just yet.  — For InsideSources

Can Vietnam talk some sense into North Korea, and in so doing make itself the go-to country in Asia for diplomatic fixes? There are those in Hanoi, and quite a few scattered across the foreign policy establishment, who think so.

Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang believes so, and would like to be the intermediary between the United States and North Korea.

Back-channel talks — if they can be called that — have begun. Influential American academics have met with leaders in Vietnam and President Quang has been involved. An idea, however inchoate, is in the air in Hanoi – and the government would very much like to see the concept grow.

For Hanoi, being useful to both Washington and Pyongyang, would help Vietnam gain international stature, as well as accelerate its importance in the region.

Globally, Asian scholars and diplomats are hoping to see strong initiatives, particularly from the United States, to affect the seeming intractability of a number of issues in Southeast Asia, which include North Korea’s adventurism and China’s continued expansion in the South China Sea. An additional irritant is China’s damming of the Mekong River, starving Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia of water.

No one involved believes that a communications channel will cause Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, to abandon his war games with rocket and missile tests. But they do believe that when and if there is a need to have some kind of opening to North Korea, and to speak to its obtuse leadership, Vietnam is uniquely well-placed facilitate a conversation.

Vietnam, like North Korea, has fought the United States. It also knows what it is like to be dependent on China for its survival, as North Korea is and as North Vietnam was. It also knows what it is like when that kind of lifeline of dependence goes wrong. Vietnam fought a war with China in 1979, with intermittent clashes until 1990.

Hanoi’s hopes to become a bigger player in the Asia diplomatic firmament extend beyond helping the United States with Pyongyang. It would like to be a bigger player in general in Asian diplomacy and use its unique history with the United States and with China to make it a valuable go-between with other countries including Myanmar and even Iran.

“Vietnam feels it has come of age among nations and wants to play a role in offering its good offices to the United States and other world powers,” says a Vietnamese academic, who lives in the United States and is involved in these early diplomatic moves. He says Vietnam, after the fall of Saigon in 1973 and the abrogation of the peace treaty in 1975, and the United States have come a long way and enjoy very good relations. Polls show the United States is favorably regarded by 78 percent of the Vietnamese population of nearly 100 million. President Obama visited a thrilled Vietnam in May. Eight percent of the foreign students studying in the United States are from Vietnam.

But all is not completely rosy. The foreign policy establishment in Washington, as well as a plethora of civil rights groups, worries about human rights in Vietnam, its authoritarian ways and the treatment of dissidents.

Particularly vexing to those who would like to see Vietnam become a kind of Asian Switzerland, friendly to all and skilled at bringing disputatious parties together, is the treatment of journalists, bloggers and others who are imprisoned when they run afoul of the Vietnamese leadership’s sensitivities. Press freedom is high on the list of reforms the West in general would like to see if Vietnam is to realize the role which it seeks.

For its part, Vietnam would like to see the United States take a stronger stand against China’s virtual annexation of the South China Sea and to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Here, there are real fears that the hostile political climate in the United States will do damage to its relations with Southeast Asia at a critical time.

Still, Vietnam wants ever-closer relations the United States and a bigger diplomatic role in Asia. The feelers are out. — For InsideSources 

On the Acela Express from Washington to Boston, I am searching my hopper of words for one that describes the feeling of watching on television Donald Trump’s press conference in Florida. I am, as it were, dumbfounded by the braggart.

Watching Trump is like watching one of nature’s lethal creatures, say a mamba or a crocodile. One wonders at the deadly speed of the snake, coiled and ready to strike its victim: a thing of beauty in its lethality, mesmerizing; or the evil certainty of the crocodile, always ready to go from seeming lethargy to lighting assault, if the unwary should seek to share the river bank.

The man who would be president has the dubious appeal of a bombaster, as he trashes people who have given their lives to public service with success, like Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Men and women who have earned high marks in the esteem of their professions and the nation. They are fools, losers, stupid and worse in the profane stream of venom that passes for campaigning from Trump. He is a man who has so little respect for others that you wonder what he does respect, besides his own money (which he refers to frequently) and foreign strongmen, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Name-calling is part of the political dialogue, but this is something other again, this Niagara Falls of abuse, of disrespect of verbal infamy; this sick, sick performance of denigrating the United States so he can save it. It is a risible attack on Americans who have built America. It also is an attack on America, and an insight into Trump’s ignorance of the world. By the way, Mr. Trump, America is still the world’s most powerful country.

Trump calls everyone he encounters names. He also calls them liars; his opponents in the primaries were liars, as is his Democratic opponent now. He calls the media “scum.”

The big lies, though, are Trump lies. He is a fairground barker, telling people anything to get them into his tattered tent.

The United States is not despised in the world: We are admired. The economy is not a disaster: It has been growing to the envy of other advanced economies.

America is great right now, today. There are problems here in social equality and other things, and huge problems in the Middle East – some, but not all, could be blamed on policy under the former and current presidents. The world still looks to America to protect, to invent, and to do the right thing. 

Trump, who finds nothing good in anyone in public life and nothing good in public policy, has given us no idea of how he would govern and whom he would rely upon to bring about the Age of Trump. All he has released is a list of conservative judges from whom he will appoint Supreme Court nominees.

When it comes to policy, all we know is that he is going to build a wall across the southern frontier, abrogate a lot of treaties, engage in trade wars, leave Europe open to Russian aggression, and extract money for his schemes from our allies and friends.

Yet, sitting behind me on this train, a woman has been praising Trump to her two traveling companions, and only stops to call someone on her cell phone and further praise him. Since biblical times, serpents have been a source of fascination. The woman behind me would follow the political version into the White House. — For InsideSources

In the beginning, there was Rupert Murdoch. He created the formula.

Then he met Roger Ailes and installed him as head of what would become America’s most successful cable news channel, Fox News Channel, also known as Fox News.

And so the formula of conservatism and sex, pioneered on a newspaper in Britain, came to television and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1969 Murdoch bought an ailing British newspaper called The Sun. He bought it from the Daily Mirror Group, then the publishers of the most successful tabloid in Britain, The Daily Mirror, and its sibling The Sunday Mirror (where I once worked). The Daily Mirror was firmly left-wing and The Sun, if anything, more so. It had started life as The Daily Herald and was owned collectively by the trade union movement.

The new owners, who used an old formula — the working class as exploited, downtrodden and hopelessly dependent on the largesse of their employers — failed to attract or excite readers.

Murdoch, fresh from Australia (although he had worked earlier as an editor in London), looked around and saw something quite different. He saw a new worker, who owned a car, took vacations in Spain (thanks to jet travel), and did not feel oppressed.

The British workers — especially working men — had thrown off the past and were now much more like the workers of Australia and the United States. It was also a period of sexual freedom.

These workers would be Murdoch’s target.

Overnight, without warning, he turned The Sun from far-left whingeing to triumphant far-right throatiness. Murdoch had realized that the working man had become a man of property.

As for sex, Murdoch would go further. British tabloids had always published “cheesecake” — pictures of busty, young women in bikinis. Murdoch took off the tops: Every day, on Page Three, he published a photo of an English rose blooming in a bikini bottom. It was bold and it was brave and it worked.

The Sun, with its new brawny politics of nationalism, anti-European attitude, right-wing enthusiasm and topless beauties, was a triumph. It began a meteoric rise, almost entirely at the expense of the forelock-tugging Daily Mirror.

The formula was born: right-wing nativism and sex.

When Murdoch came to the United States, he found the society was less louche and he could not put nudity into his newspapers. Also, there was a tradition of editorial duality: Although the politics of newspapers was not concealed, readers wanted to think that the news was impartial. Murdoch bought newspapers in San Antonio, New York, Boston and Chicago, and he started a weekly supermarket tabloid.

None succeeded and gradually Murdoch sold off these properties, except for The New York Post. Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, told me that he was the first to admit that he had misunderstood the U.S. market. That is probably why when he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007, he was careful to respect that property and to change it incrementally — for the better.

But the formula was not dead. When Ailes applied it to television, it worked all over again. Except this time, the result was even more spectacular in political power and profit.

Fox News is the voice of raucous conservatism, all served up with sex appeal.

Ailes clearly has had a fascination with beautiful, blond women reading the news — and other channels are going that way.

Ailes has done more than apply the formula: He has applied it with brio. He has given the news pace. It moves along and little inventions, like “Around the World in 80 Seconds,” are part of that energizing.

I visited with Ailes when Fox News was just beginning its ascent. He was thrilled with the fact that it had just drawn slightly ahead of CNN Headline News. I do not think he realized then how potent the formula would be and what heights his creation would reach.

Just when it needs it most, the United States is losing its most potent weapon in the fight against climate change, which might better be called global pollution. One nuclear plant is closed in Vermont, two are under threat of closure in Illinois, and the only plant in climate-conscious California is to close.

Just these four plants represent a substantial withdrawal of clean, carbon-free electricity from the market, mostly to be replaced by natural gas, and some wind and solar. Gas will do the bulk of the generating, and it is a carbon- emitter — less than coal, but a carbon source nonetheless.

What is more, these plants are up and running, which means none of the pollution associated with construction, steel-making or quarrying will have to be repeated. Some, including Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, have expressed fears that 20 more nuclear plants may yet close.

The ostensible reason for these closures is that market forces dictate them. That bald statement implies that electricity is bought and sold as freely as any multi-sourced commodity.

But electricity is not traded in any conventional way. And it is weighted in favor of the short term and political goals.

The trouble started when it was decided to deregulate electricity markets in the 1990s. The goal had nobility: Consumers would have choice. At least that is how it was sold by advocates, such as Enron.

Well, choice did not really work for consumers. But it has worked for some large industrial customers, who have been able to shop for price.

Mostly, deregulation has created two kinds of utilities: those that swallowed the deregulation pill, and those that did not, mostly in the South. The northern tier of utilities, under pressure from their state governments, deregulated, some even selling off their generating assets.

The result has been other than anticipated: Consumers have had little or no choice, and the market has set about exterminating long-lived plant, like nuclear, in favor of today’s cheapest fuel – at this moment, natural gas.

The utilities which have remained strictly regulated by their state utility commissions have been more secure financially and able to raise money more cheaply. The leader in this pack, the giant Southern Company, headquartered in Atlanta, has become a technological innovator as well as a builder of new nuclear plant.

Deregulation of the telephone monopoly — often cited during the passion to deregulate electricity — created a profusion of innovations. By contrast, deregulating electricity has just brought about a rush to the cheapest fuel of the day.

Electric utilities operate what are known as natural monopolies. Competing entities cannot install a new set of transmission wires, so the deregulated electric market had to be contrived. It was also subject to political and cultural manipulation, as the solar and wind lobbies insisted that their product get preference. Coal was edged out financially, before environmental concerns.

Deregulated utilities have formed transmission organizations to rationalize the system. These are the independent system operators, such as the Midwest ISO or PJM in the Mid-Atlantic. They auction power and the auction system favors the cheapest kilowatt on offer.

That sounds fair, right? Not quite. Some of the power comes from wind and solar, which has been subsidized by an array of tax preferences and other government supports.

Many states have renewable energy portfolios which decree that a percentage of the power has to come from these renewable resources. This is fine because they produce no carbon. But they do not produce that much reliable electricity either. It takes a lot of solar arrays or wind turbines — and then only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — to produce the same electricity as a nuclear power plant or an old-fashioned, coal-fired power plant. They need reliable backup – and that is natural gas, a fossil fuel.

Also to replace a nuclear plant with renewables chews up a lot of land, whether solar arrays or wind farms. Imperfect markets produce imperfect results. — For InsideSources

“Hello, dear. I’m the human resources director here at the network.”

“How do you do. I’m here for the reporter’s job. I have a demo tape I made for the chairman to see.”

“That’s nice, but we can get to that later — probably much later.”

“Won’t the chairman want to see my work?”

“He may ask one of the producers to look at it, or he may not. The chairman relies on his instincts and what he sees in his reporters.

“I see you’ve dressed for success: a short skirt and a gravity-challenged blouse neckline. These are important in television journalism; important to your reporting and the ratings.

“Good reporting and ratings are the same thing here. You know, gets you through the door. Gets you the job.

“The chairman is a great journalist and he can pick talent. That’s why he goes for former beauty queens. He has found they are uniquely qualified; besides with teleprompters and eager young producers, well, they can concentrate on their unique gifts.

“The chairman will assign you a hairdresser, a makeup artist and a fashion consultant. He may recommend you get those legs insured. Know what I mean?”

“You mean beauty before brains?”

“The chairman has enough brains for everyone on air. He believes in talking heads with legs. The ratings prove he’s right. Look at PBS: no legs, no ratings.”

“I was voted Miss Nuclear Waste in Las Vegas.”

“I wouldn’t mention the nuclear part. Just emphasize Las Vegas, dear.

“If you want some advice, watch those roots. Whatever you spend on your appearance, keep the blonde look. We don’t want the viewers to think you’re a brunette. The chairman wants graduates from Peroxide University.

“But I’m a brunette. People say I have beautiful brown hair.”

“There’s only beautiful blonde hair on this network. That’s in our style book, before the part about how we describe terrorists.”

“I have a BA in journalism.”

“I wouldn’t mention that around here. No, dear, no. The chairman likes to say, ‘Journalism schools are for losers.’

“If you want to work here, tell him something interesting like who you’re dating and what turns you on – you know, on dates. Lobster dinner, that kind of thing. Get my meaning?”

“You mean sex?”

“Don’t mention it. Let the chairman imagine your college years for himself.

“He’s nearly ready for you now.

“A few tips: Lean across his desk. Sometimes he doesn’t catch what you’re saying. Don’t sit before he does and, if you can, turn around a few times. He likes to assess how well you’ll do if you’re interviewing someone on a doorstep who doesn’t want to be interviewed on this network. That’s most people who aren’t on the same political wavelength: intellectuals, communists, and people from The New York Times.”

“I read all the newspapers every day: The National Enquirer, The New York Post and The Daily News.”

“The ability to read is important. Some of our biggest names use cue cards as well as the teleprompter. Also on talk shows, insults are important, like brain dead, pinhead, commie and, especially, loser.

“Just remember, television is a visual medium — and the chairman is very visual. But don’t worry, he’s not tactile.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry, dear, you’ll be reading the evening news in no time, if you don’t put on weight or have tattoos where they show.”

“Really?”

“Trust me, I know how the chairman thinks. He’s my husband.” — For InsideSources