And so ex-Sen. Brian “Multiple Choice” Joyce gets a new nickname.

Joyce’s moniker is now “Multiple Count,” in honor, or dishonor, of the 112-count, 102-page corruption indictment filed against him in federal court yesterday.

And things had been looking so rosy for the Massachusetts state Senate this week — it had been almost four days since the last solon had been disgraced. That was ex-Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg, and by the way, Joyce’s arrest is yet another nail in Rosenberg’s political coffin.

You see, the Senate president’s Pee Wee Herman look­alike boy toy, Bryon Hefner, was peripherally involved in another of Multiple Count’s schemes, this one involving a sunglass company. That high-end sunglass company — that was one of the early indications we had that Joyce was a little on the ... shady side.

But there’s nothing in the indictment about those sunglasses, or for that matter, the laundry in Randolph where Joyce supposedly got free dry cleaning all those years, not just for himself but for his staff. The G-men have plenty in there about money laundering, but laundromats — not so much.

Sprinkled throughout the complaint are quotes from the extinguished statesman, statements both practical and philosophical, such as when he is demanding free bags of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee: “No decaf.”

He knew well the three rules of life at the State House. No. 1, nothing on the level. Two, everything is a deal. Three, no deal too small.

And nothing says “no deal too small” like “No decaf.”

In one alleged shakedown, the Democrat hack rehearsed the lines he would use if anyone looked askance at his greed: “I’m the pro bono broker. ... I was asked to help by women’s club members and wouldn’t take any fees.”

Wouldn’t take any fees? This is a guy who would have stolen a hot stove and come back for the smoke. Who says the feds don’t have a sense of humor!

I heard last night from one of the women in that Milton club he was, ahem, representing: “Joyce was the kind of guy who always wanted credit for stuff like Santa arriving on the fire truck.”

Yep, that was Multiple Choice Joyce. He lived on Hinckley Road. He was a neighbor of Deval Patrick, another legend in his own mind. Now Joyce is going from the Hink to the clink.

Among his alleged payoffs: a 2014 Jeep, a summer job for a hack “relative,” commissions on both natural-gas sales and solar energy, not to mention fake retirement accounts for himself and his wife (a real-estate broker named Mary).

When you’re grabbing for all that gusto, you have to be a full-service gonif — the feds charge him with even creating backdated invoices for that no-decaf coffee, just to name one example.

Here are some of Sen. Joyce’s other famous quotes:

“Each check should be for $5,000, with no reference to me.”

“Yeah, I think I can get this permit for you. ... Our fee would be $25,000.”

“I would like to bring 500 bags of coffee.”

And, my favorite, his sage counsel to an alleged shakedown victim who gets a call from a newspaper reporter: “Suggest you not return call please.”

In these kind of indictments, by their adverbs ye shall know them, and Multiple Count’s are colorful indeed: “Falsely ... fraudulently ... did knowingly and willfully combine, conspire, confederate and agree among themselves and with others to defraud the United States. ...”

Multiple Count, formerly known as Multiple Choice, Joyce. We shall not see his like again.

Knock on wood.

Buy Howie’s new book “Kennedy Babylon” at ­howiecarrshow.com.

If you really want to get into the Christmas spirit, stop by the Governor’s Council meeting at the State House at noon today.

Santa Claus won’t be there, but he should be — to hand out the new judgeships and chuckle “Ho-ho-ho” as the pols grease the skids for yet more early retirements into the state’s hack judiciary in the new year.

If you’re a child, it’s old St. Nick who’s making a list and checking it twice, who’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.

On Beacon Hill, that chore goes to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance.

Take William J. Ritter, from the Worcester gang. I’ve written about him, and his $14,925 in campaign contributions to the local hackerama, before.

This afternoon he’s bringing his wish list to Santa, I mean the Governor’s Council, and I think his sugarplum dreams are going to come true, because he has a direct pipeline to the North Pole, I mean the Corner Office.

Ritter, who has duked $1,000 to Gov. Charlie Baker and another $3,150 to Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito, used to be in a law firm in Worcester with another barrister by the name of Stephen Rodolakis. Does that name ring a bell? Steve Rodolakis is the husband of Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito.

Another nationwide search!

“Atty. Ritter,” Polito announced when he was nominated, “has dedicated himself to practicing at the highest level of the law … .”

And she should know. Or at least her husband should.

Next we come to one Debra Squires-Lee. The Council will vote today on her nomination to the Superior Court, and she is not expected to get either switches or a lump of coal. The fix is in — Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer told me so.

Debra has an odd background. In 2012, she applied for a superior court judgeship and was not recommended. In 2015, she upped her sights to the appeals court and was again turned down.

So last year she decided to up her sights yet again. She put her name in for the opening on the Supreme Judicial Court. The third time was not the charm for Debra.

But this fall, out of nowhere, Tall Deval puts her name in for a vacancy on the Superior Court, even though she had apparently not been interviewed for the opening by the Judicial Nominating Commission. Her only qualification for a judgeship seems to be her spouse’s contribution on Nov. 2 last year to the Hillary Victory Fund.

According to a tape of the Nov. 1 Governor’s Council meeting, a puzzled Councilor Bob Jubinville asked her, “How’d you get here?”

She said she wrote a letter to the governor. Then he asked her how many jury trials she’s been involved in during her 20 years as a lawyer.

“Two,” she replied. She seems to believe that qualifies her for a hack judgeship.

The hearing was quickly recessed until last week. When she finally returned, Jubinville repeated his earlier question, “How’d you get here?”

This time she said she wrote a letter to the governor’s lawyer.

But, Jubinville pointed out, that’s not what she said the first time she testified here.

I called or emailed all of the above celebrants yesterday asking if they wanted to share any seasons’ greetings with us. But I guess they were too busy mixing up the eggnog for this afternoon’s meeting of the Governor’s Council at the State House to get back to me.

God bless us every one!

Order Howie’s new book “Kennedy Babylon” at howiecarrshow.com.

You might want to hold off writing that year-end check to the Deval Patrick for President 2020 “exploratory committee.”

The bust-out ex-governor of Massachusetts was on the political comeback trail last weekend, campaigning in Alabama against accused sexual harasser Roy Moore.

Will wonders never cease — Deval Patrick, of all people, decrying (alleged) sexual predators and assorted criminals. Talk about a change-up pitch. Better late than never, I guess.

In the past, you may recall, Deval’s heart has always gone out more than somewhat to the Al Frankens and Matt Lauers of the world. He’s been known to write a $5,000 check to one of them (convicted rapist Ben LaGuer). As governor, he busied himself trying to stop yet another convicted rapist from being forced to register as a sex offender — his own brother-in-law, Bernard Sigh.

One of Deval’s closest aides at the State House was arrested in Florida for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in a swimming pool, a charge that was dropped after Deval’s hack pal negotiated a monetary settlement with his underage victim.

But that was then, and this is now — just ask Carlos Danger, or even Bill Clinton.

Now a different pol, a Republican, Roy Moore, stood accused of behaving very badly back when he was a Democrat more than 30 years ago.

So Deval Patrick, with a slight case of Potomac fever, journeyed to Selma to take a very belated stand against male sexual predators.

“It’s occurred to me in recent times,” he mused at a Democrat rally Saturday, “that a lot in our democracy depends on unwritten rules.”

But timing is everything, and on the very same day that Deval was talking about those unwritten rules, back in Massachusetts his thug brother-in-law was again violating some written rules — namely, laws against assault with intent to rape.

Bernard Sigh is now being held without bail pending a dangerousness hearing this morning. Mere days after an incredulous reporter for the Washington Post described the failed 65-inch-high statesman as a “rising star,” Deval Patrick is once again way back in the pack of Democrat presidential wannabes, dodging reporters and preparing his traditional Merry Eid address for delivery on YouTube.

As far back as 2006, during Deval’s first campaign for governor, his soft spot for misogynist thugs became a campaign issue. His GOP opponent pointed out his support for rapist LaGuer, asking in a TV spot, “What kind of person defends a brutal rapist?”

Naturally the PC Posse went ballistic. The “r” word was tossed about. This nice young man, a neighbor of another very ethical young Democrat named Brian “Multiple Choice” Joyce, was being “Willie Horton-ed,” a reference to the convicted rapist who haunted Mike Dukakis’ 1988 run for president. According to the Quincy police report, last weekend Deval’s beloved brother-in-law confronted his female victim while “only wearing his underwear.” Sigh, however, caught at least one break from the law. He was not charged with impersonating ex-Rep. John Conyers.

This morning, presumably, Deval is back at Bain Capital, working hard, or hardly working, on his social justice mutual fund. As Deval continues his shadow campaign for president, no doubt he’ll soon be interviewed by one of his big-foot media cronies, perhaps, oh, I don’t know, Tavis Smiley ….?

Oh, I forgot. Never mind.

Order Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon,” at howiecarrshow.com.

The FBI should be devoting a lot more effort to investigating the alleged sexual predations of the state Senate president’s hubby and a lot less to shamefully brooming the espionage investigation of Hillary Clinton and attempting to subvert the duly elected president of the United States.

The way the FBI has been behaving lately is a disgrace. The corruption right now at 935 Pennsylvania Ave. NW is worse than Watergate, worse than Whitey Bulger. As police-state crooked as the Bureau has become, it needs some new initials.

May I suggest KGB?

It was reported yesterday that the local G-men have opened some kind of probe of Byron Hefner, the Pee-wee Herman look-alike who is 38 years younger than state Sen. Stanley Rosenberg. Assuming it’s true, this is good news, the first indication in months that the FBI is actually performing a public service — namely, fighting crime rather than elected Republicans.

Have you been following the adventures of FBI Agent Peter Strzok (rhymes with “suck”) and his FBI-lawyer girlfriend, Lisa Page?

Strzok and Page are the FBI’s most famous extramarital lovers since J. Edgar Hoover and his deputy director, Clyde Tolson, who for decades played Byron Hefner to Rosenberg’s Hoover. Johnny and Clyde, they called them.

Forget the Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, because there wasn’t any. It was the corrupt FBI that tried to fix the election, on behalf of Hillary Clinton.

The Clintons and the FBI spent last year in bed together, just like the never- Trump lovebirds.

As we now know, when Page and Strzok weren’t playing doctor with the shades drawn, they were madly texting back and forth about how much they despised Donald J. Trump.

In August of last year, after one such sit-down, Romeo texted Juliet:

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way (Trump) gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

An insurance policy? To make sure Trump doesn’t get elected? On his worst day, Hoover never dreamed of fixing a presidential election. He just wanted to keep his job past age 70 and get a few tips from the Mob on fixed horse races.

Strzok deep-sixed the Hillary probe, when he wasn’t heading off to Motel 6 with his married gal pal. She was another great cop — if you want to hide something real good, just stick it in one of Lisa Page’s law books.

When Strzok was finally busted last summer, he wasn’t summarily fired. He now works in the FBI’s HR — Human Relations.

So don’t worry, Bryon Hefner. Maybe you too can make your problem go away. Do I have to draw you a diagram?

Order Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon,” at howiecarrshow.com.

If a Hollywood producer were remaking “The Graduate,” he’d have to rewrite the party scene where a businessman offers Dustin Hoffman that famous career advice:

“One word: plastics.”

Here’s what the older man would say now, at least if he lived in Massachusetts: “Two words: public sector.”

Or maybe, “Two words: defined benefits.” As in, pension.

It’s almost Christmas, but it doesn’t seem like it in the public sector, where every day is Christmas. Yesterday it was the news that Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and his hacks are setting themselves up for still more pay raises, compliments of the traditional “blue-ribbon” commission. Pabst Blue Ribbon, that is.

The City Hall story broke a day after reports that the top brass of the state police forced out in the Worcester judge scandal are walking away with close to $300,000 in, ahem, unused vacation and sick time. And that’s just gravy on top of their “defined-benefit” pensions of more than $150,000 a year per trooper.

Officially, Col. Richard McKeon and Deputy Supt. Francis Hughes “retired,” but let’s face it, they were fired after honest state troopers were ordered to falsify arrest reports to protect the junkie OUI-driving daughter of a hack judge. But the dodgy circumstances of their exits counted for naught. In his Thursday paycheck, McKeon pocketed the extra $161,688.20, and Hughes grabbed $130,368.84.

Death, where is thy sting?

I can still remember when Gov. Mike Dukakis was first running for reelection in 1978. Wherever he campaigned, he was dogged by troopers’ wives, heckling him and holding signs complaining about their husbands’ poverty-level wages. Some even claimed they were on food stamps.

Man, have times changed.

Back then, a young guy would run into people — say, your uncle, or maybe the guy on the next barstool over — who’d give you some free advice: Think about getting on the city, kid. Or the state. Or the county. Money might not be quite as good, but the bennies ... And behind that comes the pension. It’s even better than the Edison.

A few years back, I was talking to a payroll patriot at City Hall who’d engineered some huge grift by which he was collecting tens of thousands of dollars from his previous hack job after being elected to another sinecure (the salary of which is about to go up to $103,000 under the latest smash-and-grab).

I told this guy the usual thing: that it’s one thing to feed at the trough, but that he was licking the plate.

“You don’t understand,” he told me. “When I first got this job, we didn’t get as much as people on the outside.”

Yes, I said. But that was 35 years ago! Now you’re the richest guy in town. And you don’t have to worry about ever being laid off. And at the end you get a kiss in the mail, plus free health care.

There are managers in state government who try to avoid ever sending their staffers down to City Hall for more than an hour or two. They don’t want them chatting with Marty’s hacks and figuring out just how high the salaries have gotten down there. And as we all well understand, the hacks on Beacon Hill are not exactly underpaid.

There’s an old saying, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. But that axiom does not apply in a one-party state, which is what Massachusetts is. No legislators will be ousted from office next year for those obscene pay raises they handed themselves last January.

Ironically, the only hack who’s been humbled in the wake of that greediest heist in state history is the architect of the highway robbery — ex-state Senate President Stanley Rosenberg. He’s already forfeited his $80,000 “stipend,” but Rosenberg’s disgrace had nothing to do with the anger of his constituents. He represents Amherst, for Pete’s sake. Taxpayers are few and far between in the Happy Valley.

No, the 68-year-old Lothario was doomed by numerous sexual assault allegations levied against his husband.

Rosenberg is the exception that proves the rule. For everyone else in the hackerama, it doesn’t matter how badly they behave, there are no adverse consequences. Just ask Felix Arroyo — both of them.

Or Marty Walsh’s two indicted coat holders awaiting trial next year in the Boston Calling shakedown case — those hacks have been collecting their full six-figure salaries since they were indicted in the spring of 2016. They’ve been on paid vacation longer than Felix Arroyo — either of them.

And getting back to the newly retired nouveau-riche MSP brass — the judge at the center of the scandal that ended their careers is another lifelong hack by the name of Timothy Bibaud. Thanks to Rosenberg’s connivances last winter, that extinguished jurist, and all the rest of those black-robed bums, will collect their third $6,500 pay raise in 11 months on Jan. 1, and then yet another $6,500 pay hike July 1.

Two words: public sector.

Order Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon,” at howiecarrshow.com.

I told you so.

Just 12 days ago, the headline above my column read: “Al Franken sign-off likely fake news.”

And now, just as I predicted, right on schedule, with the special Senate election in Alabama over, the despicable groper is being, ahem, urged to rescind his reputed resignation.

Here’s how I started my Dec. 8 column:

“Al Franken-slime still doesn’t think he did anything wrong, which is why I won’t believe the vile Democrat pervert is really gone until he actually resigns, rather than just vaguely claiming he’s going to do the right thing, sometime in ‘the coming weeks.’ ”

Now it looks like those coming weeks may never come. Hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.

Franken’s “resignation” was nothing more than a talking point for the Democrat operatives with press passes, like Comrade Chris Matthews of MSNBC. Pre-Alabama, this is what he said about Franken’s finest hour:

“The worst you can say about Democrats is they’re too pure.”

Rather ironic statement, in retrospect, considering that we have since learned that the network had to dish out $40,000 to a victim of Comrade Chris’ own sexual harassment. For those of you keeping score at home, that makes nine — count em, nine — NBC employees busted for impersonating Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, those two icons of the “pure” party.

Matthews continued: “These guys set too high a standard for public office.”

Riiiight, Comrade Chris!

At the time Franken announced his alleged resignation, the pure party was in a bit of a bind. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich,) the founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, was being forced out — something about underwear — so it wouldn’t have looked good to have the rich honky in the Senate skating while the brother went down in flames.

But in the pervarama, events move quickly.

Since Franken delivered his lame goodbye, a horny host of other solons has been outed, from both parties. Most importantly, more members of the Congressional Black Caucus have since been implicated in various permutations on the perv theme — Reps. Alcee Hastings, Gregory Meeks, Al Green and Bobby Scott, among others.

So any potential charges of double standards are now moot. Black perv, white perv, if you’re a Democrat, the standard is the same — no standard. Just like in those halcyon Clinton-Kennedy days.

As Comrade Chris put it before he was outed: “I think it’s important that the Democratic party has at least remained consistent.”

Yeah, that’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. Consistency, thy name is pervarama.

And then of course there’s ex-Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee. He’s a twofer in this squalid tableau — a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus who after retiring due to ill health (the voters got sick of him) landed a job at MSNBC.

Then came the … allegations … that Ford too had been touching everything but the third rail, and he became the second perv pundit on the deranged Morning Joe show to go down in flames, after Mark Halperin. Seriously, who could ever have dreamed that both Ford and Halperin would be fired before Mike Barnicle?

In the onrushing tide of the pervarama, or pervnado, or whatever you prefer to call it, Al Frankenslime has become yesterday’s news. He thinks our short attention spans will enable him to live to goose another day.

I told you so.

Order Howie’s new book “Kennedy Babylon” at howiecarrshow.com.

Will the producers of the new movie “Chappaquiddick” be nominated for a Profiles in Courage award next spring?

The flick is supposed to open April 6, just before the Kennedy family hands out their annual awards, ostensibly for political bravery, in reality for political correctness above and beyond the call of duty.

So no, I don’t see a grip ‘n’ greet with Caroline and her John-John look-alike son in director John Curran’s future.

But judging by the trailer at least, this looks like a film worth seeing. Check it out, the last scene in the 2:27 preview is devastating. Teddy Kennedy is comparing himself to Biblical figures, including Moses, whom Teddy says had a temper. Teddy’s aide replies, “Moses had a temper, but he never left a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea.”

Now that’s harsh. I mean, Ted Kennedy once tried to shut this newspaper down just because I called him “Fat Boy.” The Kennedys do not play well with others.

The People magazine story about the trailer says, “Watch Ted Kennedy’s Life Get Derailed.” That’s the way the story has always been played. It’s Ted Kennedy’s life getting derailed, not Mary Jo Kopechne’s. Teddy lived to the ripe old age of 77. Mary Jo suffocated at the age of 28. But it’s Teddy’s life that got derailed.

The trailer says “Chappaquiddick” is “Based on the Untold Story.”

Actually, it’s not exactly an untold story, but most people have never heard the real story, at least not if they live around here. Teddy was the “Liberal Lion” of the Senate — that’s “Lion,” not “Lyin’.” Every sixth year, when he ran for re-election, the Globe would run endless puff pieces about how he was “turning his life around.”

If you brought up Chappaquiddick in polite company, say on Brattle Street, somebody would be sure to tut-tut: “Hasn’t that poor family suffered enough?”

Here are some facts most people don’t know about Chappaquiddick:

When he filled out the initial Edgartown police report, Teddy began, “There was one passenger with me, one Mary Jo — ”

After that he left a blank space, because he didn’t know her last name.

At the time of her drowning death, Mary Jo was not wearing underwear.

At one time, Mary Jo’s landlord in D.C. was Bobby Baker, a bagman for LBJ who also procured hookers for President Kennedy in the White House, including a suspected East German spy who was deported shortly before Nov. 22, 1963.

Mary Jo’s body was hustled off the island before the medical examiner had a chance to examine it, and months later a judge in Pennsylvania refused to allow its exhumation for a proper autopsy.

From the trailer, it looks like they took at least some license with the facts, but you have to when you’re dealing with the messy sprawl of history. The trailer has Teddy’s dying father Joe, left crippled and speechless by a stroke in 1961, slapping his runt of the litter. From all accounts, that probably didn’t happen, but it should have.

Hooray for Hollywood.

Howie’s new book “Kennedy Babylon,” available at howiecarrshow.com and amazon.com, has a chapter on Chappaquiddick.

Has the left ever met a bloodthirsty Muslim terrorist that they didn’t want to give a big hug and a wet kiss to?

C’mon down, Akayed Ullah, the New York Port Authority bus terminal suicide bomber from Bangladesh, this month’s “diversity lottery” terrorist.

In the underground corridor linking the bus station to Times Square, the devout Muslim walked by any number of ads and billboards for assorted infidel products, until he got to where he wanted to detonate his homemade pipe bomb full of nails.

He set it off in front of a Christmas poster.

Needless to say, The New York Times has been swooning over this nice young man. The undocumented immigrant got the traditional front-page sob story last week. He was a good boy, a very good boy. He had recently returned to the Third World hellhole from which he came. It was a “lonely trip.”

Cue the violins.“(He was) following his own heart, reflecting some sort of inner struggle ... loving and giving ... found enormous satisfaction in doing charity work ... (A friend said) ‘he didn’t smoke, he didn’t misbehave, he was always cordial, he was the type of guy who couldn’t commit any crime.’ ”

Of course not. In diversity lottery circles, since when is murdering infidels in cold blood a crime?

All these stories follow the same pattern. Certain themes reoccur. The immigrant is a lone wolf, home-grown, self-radicalized. Muslim community fears backlash, etc.

Naturally, the Times tells us that what made this immigrant want to start a jihad against taxpayers remains a “mystery.” (Barack Obama preferred to say, “We may never know the motives.”) The terrorist’s customary “deepening religiosity” is followed, inevitably, by the growth of “a big beard.”

Then Ullah follows in the footsteps of the elder Tsarnaev brother — he returns to his homeland, which is teeming with his fellow terrorists.

“The purpose of his visit,” the Times writes, “was to get all the paperwork in order for his wife and 6-month-old son to immigrate to New York.”

Which is puzzling, because as the top counterterrorism cop in Dhaka says, “He seemed to have this hatred of America.”

No doubt he did, but on the other hand, they don’t have any EBT cards in Bangladesh. Or Medicaid. Or WIC. Or Obamaphones.

This week we also had the sentencing of our local Muslim terrorist from Everett, David Daoud Wright. Before the judge gave him 28 years, this fat fiend’s public defenders told us of the “highly respectful manner in which he comported himself relative to corrections staff at all times.”

Now that he’s bound for Club Fed, we will soon learn that the 350-pound holy warrior is a “role model” for other jailbird Muslim terrorists. We will be told he is “turning his life around.”

Prior to the sentencing, his mom assured us that as a young boy, the future ISIS terrorist dreamed of becoming a heart surgeon, loved classical music and was “fascinated” by dinosaurs.

Later, he became fascinated by the idea of beheading cops and Pamela Geller.

Have you ever read about an evil Muslim terrorist? Not in the alt-left media you haven’t. The Chattanooga mass murderer was an “All American boy.” Ditto, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, in addition to which the Joker was “tousle-haired.” Jann Wenner was so infatuated with Tsarnaev that he put him on the cover of the fake-news Rolling Stone magazine.

Remember the Globe’s series of sob stories about the shiftless, welfare-leeching Tsarnaevs? They called the 25-year-old brother, Speedbump, a “stay-at-home dad.” The cops called him something else — a “person of interest” in seven unsolved murders.

As he lay wounded in the boat in Watertown, the Joker wrote out his terrorist manifesto about how much he hated the U.S. and Christians. That was Friday night. On Sunday morning, then-Gov. Deval Patrick was asked on CBS by Bob Schieffer if he knew the motives of the drug-dealing, serial-killing Muslim terrorists living on welfare in Sect. 8 housing in Cambridge.

“Not yet, Bob,” Patrick replied. “Uh, and it’s hard, it’s hard for me and for many to imagine what could motivate, uh, people to, uh, harm, uh, innocent men, women and children, uh, in the way that, uh, these two fellows did.”

If I ever get in a jam, I ask for no special treatment from the alt-left media. Just treat me like you’d treat a foreign Muslim terrorist.

Order Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon,” at howiecarrshow.com.

2017 may have started out as the year of the celebrity perv, but now it ends as the year of rehab — which is where all celebrity pervs go to escape the wrath of their victims.

Just ask Harvey Weinstein, or Kevin Spacey, or Ben Affleck, or for that matter Sen. Stan Rosenberg’s Pee-wee Herman-look-alike boy toy. Just last week it was ESPN boss John Skipper, who at the age of 62 suddenly discovered he has a problem with “substance abuse.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson once famously said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. A century later, a U.S. House speaker amended that aphorism, saying that when he was defining the last refuge of a scoundrel, “Dr. Johnson overlooked the infinite and boundless possibilities of the word ‘reform.’ ”

And now yet another amendment is in order:

Rehab is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

First come the headlines, either about a politician invariably described as “embattled” or an entertainer who is “troubled.” Then their publicist says they are off to an “undisclosed location” for, yes, rehab.

If it’s part of a plea deal, it may be called “lockdown rehab.” Think Lindsay Lohan.

Many celebs have been in and out of rehab multiple times. If this is your fifth or sixth trip, your flack says you’re merely checking in for a “tune up.” Think Chevy Chase.

For embattled perv pols, entering rehab is not a guaranteed magic bullet to avoid prosecution. Remember the photos of ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, aka Carlos Danger, riding a horse as part of his “equine therapy,” which is very fashionable these days in the perverama.

Alas, Carlos is now continuing his therapy — at federal prison at Devens. It’s the Bureau of Prisons’ perv-rehab center. I’m assuming Carlos is now attending daily 12-step meetings — “Hi, my number is 79112-054 and I was on my way to becoming mayor of New York until I perved out!”

Not every celeb has to flee to rehab. If you’re too old to worry about resurrecting your career, there’s no need to spend big bucks out in the desert somewhere with no Wi-Fi. Charlie Rose and Garrison Keillor, two public-broadcasting pervs, are in their 70s — why bother with tiresome charades about turning their lives around?

Then there’s the filthy-rich class of pervs. For instance, Matt Lauer. He turns 60 in a couple of days. His career’s over and he knows it, and so what — he’s banked more money than God. Rehab — save that jive for People magazine!

Anyway, I’m in Florida, and Saturday night I found myself at a local bistro.

It was about 6 o’clock. My daughter looked over and whispered to me, “Do you see that woman over there — that’s LuAnn de Lesseps!”

Apparently she is, or was, in “Real Housewives of New York,” or something. She was a “countess.” I glanced over — the countess didn’t appear to have ingested a bad ice cube, at least not at that point.

Imagine my surprise the next day, Christmas Eve, when I saw her mugshot in the news, charged in Palm Beach County with disorderly intoxication and battery on a police officer.

She blamed it all on “long-buried emotions.” Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

But now, the countess told the Page Six gossip column, “I am committed to a transformative and hopeful 2018.”

You know what that means. “A transformative and hopeful 2018” is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Order Howie’s new book “Kennedy Babylon” at howiecarrshow.com.

Predictions for 2018?

Here they are, courtesy of that mysterious visitor from the East, the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-telling, all-omniscient seer, sage, soothsayer and occasional visitor to Mar-a-Lago — Carrnac the Magnificent!

It is written in the stars that this will happen in the New Year:

The MBTA will adopt a new slogan: “This Train is Not in Service at This Time.”

The Worcester judge/state police investigation(s) will end, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Ex-Sen. Brian “Multiple Choice” Joyce will accept a plea bargain. (Carrnac muses: What kind of coffee do they serve in Club Fed?)

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey — the man that time forgot, and will continue to forget in 2018.

Over-under on how many times Gov. Charlie “Tall Deval” Baker will say he’s “disappointed” in President Trump: 35. (Number may fluctuate depending on tightness of polls.)

Over-under on how many times Attorney General Maura Healey will sue President Trump: 47. (Carrnac acknowledges that yes, this is more than the 20-plus suits that the one-trick, or should I say one-Trump pony was involved in against him this year. But remember, Trump was only president for 345 days in 2017, and more importantly, 2018 is an election year.)

The Herald will not be the only Boston newspaper for sale in 2018.

A scandal, most likely involving golf carts, will rock DCR, and the perp will turn out to be a resident of Shrewsbury who is a campaign contributor to Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito.

City Hall hacks Kenneth Brissette and Timothy Sullivan will beat the rap.

Octogenarian gangster Cadillac Frank Salemme will not.

The state’s confiscatory graduated-income tax will be approved by the voters in November, and Amazon will not move its new headquarters here — the spirits tell Carrnac these may be related developments.

A strange thing will happen in the secretary of state debate between incumbent Bill Galvin and Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim — as Zakim speaks, ex-Treasurer Steve Grossman’s lips will be moving.

Stanley Rosenberg will resign from the Senate — or should Carrnac say, in the spirit of the MBTA during the current cold snap, he will no longer be in service.

Ditto, Boston School Superintendent Tommy Chang.

The Globe’s code of omerta about its own sexual harassment scandals will begin to crumble, and old stories will resurface — like the one about the staffer who, as he was being lugged by the BPD for allegedly flashing his neighbors, asked the cops, “Am I being arrested?” (Carrnac has obtained incident report.)

Then there was the angry estranged husband of a woman who was allegedly running around with a pompous scribe, and the husband began sending out photos of his soon-to-be ex-wife, who is now married to the bow-tied bumkisser, locked inside a dog kennel. (How does Carrnac know this? It was not written in the stars, it was written up in one of the Inside Track’s old Naked City columns in 2006.)

Over-under on the number of Kennedys that will arrested on the Cape next summer: three.

Daniel Koh will not win the Third Congressional District seat — there’s only so far you can get when your only rationale for running is, “Mahhhhty sent me!”

Plus, how many Seth Moultons does one state really need in its congressional delegation?

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren will continue to raise much wampum and send out smoke signals that she plans to go on the warpath against Great Orange Father in 2020.

The Patriots will win Super Bowl LII and the Red Sox will not win the World Series — hey, Carr­nac needs some gimme picks, too.

Plymouth District Attorney Tim Cruz will receive many campaign contributions from the very, very grateful partners at Mintz, Levin law firm.

Ronan Farrow will not win any major journalism awards for his groundbreaking series of magazine stories on Harvey Weinstein — they opened up a can of worms that brought down far too many sanctimonious PC panjandrums.

Speaking of which, the next two to fall will be a late-night “comedian” and the boss of a cable news network — actually, Carrnac thought they would have dropped by now.

The Profiles in Courage Award will go to a Democrat — and don’t rule out Al Franken either. If he does indeed resign, he will instantly become a ... victim, not to mention, he was one of the most hands-on members of the Senate.

We will find out about more sexual harassment settlements at the State House, and the names of the lewd and lascivious lawmakers will surprise no one.

In all the breaking-the-glass-ceiling stories you will be reading next week about Andrea Campbell being elected president of the Boston City Council, not one will mention that she is the daughter of one of Boston’s biggest gangsters, the late Alvin Campbell.

Not that that makes her a bad person, but it is part of the historical record, is it not?

Also not included in any of the puff pieces about Campbell will be Freddie Langone’s apt description of the true meaning of being president of the City Council: “It’s like being an admiral in the Swiss Navy.”

Carrnac wishes everyone a Happy New Year.

Order Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon,” at howiecarrshow.com.

As 2018 begins, Donald Trump seems to be channeling Theodore Roosevelt.

TR famously said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” which Trump only half believes — the big stick part. Speaking softly? Forget about it!

But here’s the other TR quote that seems apropos for Trump right now, especially in foreign policy:

“Once you have them by the (bleep), their hearts and minds will follow.”

Just ask Kim Jong Un, also known as Little Rocket Man. Yesterday, LRM issued an unexpected New Year’s olive branch of sorts to the prosperous First World democracy that his destitute Third World hellhole shares a peninsula with. It concerned the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

“We sincerely wish that the event will be held with good results.”

Oh sure, he also rattled the sabers against the U.S., bragging about having a button on his desk like Matt Lauer used to have at NBC, only instead of locking the door on an intern, the way Lauer’s button did, LRM’s button allows him to launch a nuclear weapon at the U.S.

Or so he claims.

But the key is, sending his regards to South Korea could mean, as The New York Times grudgingly puts it, “a slight thaw” over what the Democrats were wetting their pants over last week — a potential nuclear war in Asia.

Of course, the alt-left pajama boys can’t give Trump credit for anything, so the Times had to also speculate that maybe LRM was merely trying to “drive a wedge” between the U.S. and South Korea.

But that’s just what the Times and the rest of ’em do. They can’t help themselves.

Do you suppose this sudden “thaw” in Pyongyang has anything to do with the fact that China just shut down its biggest bridge for sending supplies into North Korea for “repairs”? Odd, how that bridge that’s a lifeline for LRM’s crappy country should suddenly fall apart immediately after Trump, Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley started yelling at the Chinese … .

Apparently Trump knows something about grabbing body parts other than the ones he was bragging about grabbing in that Access Hollywood tape.

Things finally seem to be breaking America’s way in foreign policy. How do we know this? Because CNN and MSNBC et al., are suddenly silent about, among other things, Iran, which just happens to be, like NoKo, part of the old “Axis of Evil.”

Iran is now wracked by riots against the savage Muslim theocracy that Obama and John Kerry spent eight years trying to prop up. The population is rising up because the economy is in ruins, and why is that? Because the price of oil has collapsed, and why is that?

Could it possibly have something to do with the fact that the U.S. is suddenly the world’s leading energy producer again? The Keystone XL pipeline is being built — thank you, President Trump! — and that will drive oil prices even lower, which means less money for Hezbollah and all the other terrorists Iran supports.

“Along with human rights,” Trump tweeted yesterday, “the wealth of Iran is being looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!”

Already, the new Dakota Access Pipeline is leading to increases in U.S. oil production, which means less money for Iran, and more riots for mullahs. In September alone, production in North Dakota increased 78,000 barrels a day. It’s a toss-up who’s angrier, Tom Steyer or Ayatollah Khamenei. Either way, I call this winning.

Next country to get a little TR medicine courtesy of Donald J. Trump: Pakistan.

Trump tweeted yesterday how the U.S. has handed that Muslim kleptocracy $33 billion in the last 15 years “and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit…. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan with little help. No more!”

If the North Korea-Iran pattern follows, this may not be a very happy new year for the Taliban.

Remember how during the South Carolina primary in 2016, Trump told the crowd at a golf club: “We’re going to win so much, you’re going to get tired of winning.”

Not yet, Mr. President, not yet.

Order Howie’s new book “Kennedy Babylon” at howiecarrshow.com.

As of 3:12 yesterday afternoon, Willard Mitt Romney’s “geotag” on Twitter was “Massachusetts.”

By 5:45, it had been changed to “Holladay, Utah.”

It seems pretty clear where this is all headed, as only about a million people immediately noticed online. Dudley Do-Right is running for the U.S. Senate, from Utah. So long, Orrin Hatch. Don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.

Mitt wanted to be president, but hey, so did his father. Now, what can you say except, any port in a storm. And this time, the media will treat him with respect — at least as long as he comes across as the Mitt Romney of March 2016, when he tore into Donald Trump as “a phony, a fraud.”

If, on the other hand, he is the Mitt Romney of December 2016, making the pilgrimage to Trump Tower to kiss Trump’s ring (which was in his back pants pocket) in a groveling attempt to be appointed secretary of state — well, what was it that John Lakian called him in the 1994 Senate race?

“Mr. Mormon.”

Mitt said something about “binders full of women” — misogynist! Worst human ever! Bill Clinton is credibly accused of rape — nothing to see here folks, move on.

Mitt Romney mentions tar baby — racist! John Kerry mentions tar baby — yawn, it’s just an old expression … .

Then there was his dog, Seamus the Irish setter, whom Mitt put in a crate on the top of his car for a road trip from Massachusetts to Michigan. One day, at the Republican convention in Tampa in 2012, the sad fate of Seamus was mentioned in two separate columns on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Obama used to eat dogs for lunch in Indonesia and his acolytes never said ruff. I’ll bet if you’d given Seamus the option — crate or slow cooker — he’d have — oh, never mind.

At age 70, Mitt has still only won one election — governor of Massachusetts in 2002. In a series of tweets in 2016, Trump succinctly summed up Willard’s bust-out career in politics.

“I am not a Mitt Romney, who doesn’t know how to win … two-time failed candidate … who ran one of the worst races in presidential history. … Not a good messenger!”

There’s a saying in baseball about pitchers who fail to live up to their potential — “million-dollar arm, ten-cent head.” In a political sense, that’s Mitt Romney. When Trump was trolling him about becoming secretary of state, he said Romney looked like he was “right out of Central Casting.”

The problem with Mitt is, he’s afraid of his own shadow. The besotted Ted Kennedy bludgeoned him in the 1994 Senate debate at Faneuil Hall. In 2012, he went into the fetal position when Obama and the aptly named “Candy” Crowley ganged up on him.

But I think this comeback campaign is more about Donald Trump. There’s only nine months’ difference in age between them. And Trump accomplished something neither Mitt nor his father could ever do — he won the presidency.

Now the Senate will have to be his consolation prize, just like it was, ironically enough, for his first foe, Teddy Kennedy. And then, after a term or two, probably two, Mitt can pass the seat down to someone in his family, just like the Conyers and the Dingells and the Kilpatricks — it’s a Detroit thing.

Did I mention, Mitt’s from Detroit? Or he used to be. He’s from Utah now and has been since … 5:45 last night.

Order Howie’s new book Kennedy Babylon at howiecarrshow.com.

Finally, an awards show I’m interested in — the first annual Fake News Awards, to be unveiled Monday at 5 p.m. by President Donald J. Trump at the White House.

Will there be a red carpet — or perhaps it should be pink, to commemorate all the parlor pinks in the alt-left media who will be receiving the august honors? And by the way, what will we call the actual trophies? So many names are taken — Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, etc.

So let’s call the Fake News awards the Barnicles, for obvious reasons.

You know this is one of those situations where all the card-carrying fellow travelers are actually fervently hoping that they win — it’s like the Nixon enemies list, or Whitey Bulger’s list of defense witnesses who were reporters. To be included was a badge of honor; not to make the list was a humiliation. (I was too young for Nixon’s, but by God I made Whitey’s list!)

Mr. President, here are my nominees for your first annual Fake News Awards:

Best Fake News Fake Republican: A crowded field, including among others David Frum, Bill Kristol and George Will. But the winner is Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post, who was against the Paris climate accords until Trump was, after which she loved them. She was against DACA until Trump denounced the Dreamers, after which she flip-flopped. She was totally in favor of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem until — well, you get the picture.

Best election-night 2016 weeping live on air: Martha Raddatz, ABC News.

Lifetime-achievement award for fake news, cable news division: CNN for falsely reporting, among many other things, Anthony Scaramucci’s ties to Russians (three hacks fired); that James Comey would tell Congress he never told Trump he wasn’t under investigation re: Russia; that Nancy Sinatra complained about Trump using her father’s music at his inauguration; that a Republican donor financed the dodgy dossier; that Donald Trump Jr. got early access to stolen DNC emails; that Trump poisoned koi fish in Japan; that Trump didn’t know that Japanese car manufacturers had factories in the U.S. ...

The Alamo Award: To Yahoo News, for falsely reporting that President Trump was planning to invade Mexico.

The I Have a Dream, or Maybe a Hallucination Award: To Time magazine, for falsely reporting that Trump had removed the bust of MLK Jr. from the Oval Office, because when the crack scribe looked for it, someone was standing in front of the bust, blocking his view.

Lifetime-achievement fake news award, print division: Washington Post, for falsely reporting, among many other things, that Russia hacked the U.S. electric-power grid (it was a guy checking his email); that Trump’s late father Fred when he was running for mayor of NYC ran blatantly anti-black TV spots (he never ran for mayor; the “ads” were an internet parody); that no one showed up at Trump’s December rally in Pensacola, Fla. (the Post had to apologize for that bogus report); for Dana Milbank having one of his 2016 columns actually written by the Hillary campaign. ...

One last thing, Mr. President. There’s so much material here, are you sure this is just a one-hour awards show? This could be a miniseries, or in fact, a maxiseries.

Order Howie’s new book, Kennedy Babylon, at howiecarrshow.com.

I loved Bob Crane.

He was the state treasurer for 27 years, and in the 27 years since he left office, there have been five state treasurers, mostly because they all had big egos, and they wanted something more, because they didn’t know how good they had it, thanks mainly to Robert Quentin Crane.

They were lucky, in other words, but they didn’t appreciate it. That was one thing about Bob Crane, who died Thursday at the age of 91 — he was one lucky guy, and he knew it.

And we were all lucky to know Bob Crane. As the late talk-show host Jerry Williams used to say of him, “Not a bad guy!”

Crane became treasurer in 1964, because he’d been lucky enough to go to Boston College (and I think before that Boston English) with John Driscoll, who was then the treasurer. The problem for Driscoll was, in those days a treasurer could only serve three two-year terms — six years in all.

Driscoll was bumping up against the limit, so when the job of Turnpike chairman opened up, Driscoll grabbed it. But before he announced he was resigning as treasurer, Driscoll tipped off his classmate Crane, and Crane rounded up enough votes in the legislature to get the job.

The first thing Bob did once he was in office was to get his pals in the General Court to do away with the three-term limit. Then he got the boys to increase the treasurer’s term of office to four years.

And he was off and running.

In the early 1970s, Crane got lucky again. The legislature was setting up something called the State Lottery Commission. Normally, the Lottery would have been controlled by the governor, but the governor was a Republican, Frank Sargent. C’mon down again, Bob!

At the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in South Boston, Senate President Billy Bulger always used to introduce him as “the biggest bookie in Massachusetts.” Which he was.

And that brings us to perhaps the luckiest moment of his political career, in 1991, ironically enough a few months after he had left office. Billy Bulger’s gangster brother Whitey “won” Mass Millions. And Bob Crane wasn’t treasurer. He couldn’t believe his great fortune.

“Thank God!” he said. “Thank God it’s not my fault!”

When James Michael Curley’s last surviving son was down and out, guess who took care of him? Bob always did the right thing. His State House office was above the arch, and he could look out and watch everybody walking in to work from Bowdoin Street.

I remember one morning, it must have been 1984, I was trudging into the State House, a little down. I’d read in the morning paper that I was getting fired from my job at Ch. 7. As I reached the arch, I heard a knock on the window above, and I looked up. It was Bob, motioning me to come upstairs.

“Don’t worry about a thing, kid,” he told me. “You’ll be OK.”

As it turned out, I was. He didn’t know, but he just wanted to make me feel a little better.

When he was the state rep from Brighton, Bob lived on Burton Street, the last street before Ward 22 turns into Newton. But Crane was Boston all the way. There was a classic Beacon Hill saying attributed to him, which he always denied, but I believe he said it, because it sounds so much like him:

“When the boys from the suburbs go home, the boys from Boston go to work.”

So many memories … his musical group, the Treasury Notes … the recount on his 1960 primary loss to a guy named John Cort, and the recount after the ballots were stashed in the basement of Presentation parish … staring down Ted Kennedy in 1976 when he demanded that Bob give up the treasurer’s job to make way for Ted’s callow 24-year-old nephew Joe … his days as chairman of the Convention Center Authority, doing favors for Billy Bulger, rolling his eyes and saying, “This is for the little man upstairs.”

Every year on St. Patrick’s Day at Halitosis Hall, the little man upstairs would ask Crane what Irish song he wanted to sing. Usually he’d say “Dear Old Donegal,” an old Bing Crosby tune about a son of Erin arriving in the U.S.:

“There wasn’t a soul to greet me there / A stranger on your shore / But Irish luck was with me here / And riches came galore.”

Like I said, Bob was a lucky guy, and he was one of the rare lucky guys who knew it, and appreciated his Irish luck.

I remember once a few years ago, he told me about how he arrived at the State House in 1957, at the age of 30.

“I looked around and I said to myself, ‘This is the place for me!’” he said. “When I started out, you know, I was always the youngest guy in the room. Now … .” He shook his head sadly. “Now … .”

Hey Bob, now I know how you feel. Rest in peace.

Sometimes, when something really bad happened at the State House, I would ask the late Bob Crane why anyone would do something that stupid, and he always had the same answer:

“They can’t help themselves.”

They buried Bob in Wellesley yesterday, but nothing has changed on Beacon Hill. They still can’t help themselves.

On Monday, after the weekly sit-down of the governor and the legislative leadership, House Speaker Bob DeLeo, the unindicted co-conspirator, was asked if new taxes were on the table in FY 2019.

“Much too early to discuss that at all,” he snapped.

Really? DeLeo said this a few days after the Department of Revenue announced that December tax collections came in $527 million above projections. The commonwealth collected more than $3 billion in taxes that month — in other words, over $100 million a day.

Six months into the fiscal year, state tax collections are running $728 million above estimates for the year.

But grabbing $100 million a day is not enough, apparently. It never is. Because these hacks have a disease. They are taxaholics, and they need a 12-step program of their very own. They could have meetings, but they would need a big room, probably Gardner Auditorium.

“One tax is too many,” the payroll patriots could all chant together, “and a thousand are not enough.”

So they’re not ruling out more tax increases, and this is even before the scheduled referendum question on the statewide ballot in November asking the voters to impose a graduated income tax on themselves.

In the hackerama, this proposal is described as a “millionaire tax.” But rest assured, if it passes, by 2021 at the latest you will be defined as a “millionaire,” at least for the purposes of paying state taxes, even if you only make $40,000 a year.

Five times the hacks have tried to bamboozle the taxpayers into picking their own pockets. Five times they have failed. But it’s never over until the hacks win, and this time could be the charm. They’re not making voters as smart as they used to, in case you haven’t noticed.

If the hacks succeed in jacking up the state income tax from 5 percent to 9 percent, do you suppose a lot of the “millionaires” of Massachusetts have some contingency plan?

Like, say, moving?

Consider the strange case of Connecticut. The Nutmeg State’s politicians can’t help themselves either. They’ve been jacking up taxes right and left for years, and the darnedest thing has happened.

The supply of “millionaires” is falling. Go figure.

Last week, the Hartford Courant reported that last year alone 7,944 Connecticut tax-filers fled to Florida. Their average income: $253,187 a year.

Connecticut’s top tax rate is 7 percent. Florida’s is zero. Hmmm, why would all these Connecticut residents suddenly pick the same state to move to?

New Jersey has an even higher top tax rate — 8.97 percent. Meet David Tepper, a hedge-fund billionaire, who lives in the Garden State, or did, until he realized that when you make $3.5 billion a year, which he did in 2013, it might be prudent to relocate to a state with no income tax.

As the Republican leader of the New Jersey Legislature said, “Who can blame him?”

This one guy Tepper moves to Miami Beach, and The New York Times estimates he may have put a $300 million hole in the New Jersey state budget.

But these are just “anecdotes,” as Deval Patrick used to say. Just because they’re voting with their feet in New Jersey and Connecticut, our “millionaires” won’t dare leave the, uh, Hub of the Universe.

Gov. Charlie “Tall Deval” Baker basks in his allegedly high favorability ratings. Apparently, they never poll any MBTA commuters, who are suffering through yet another winter from hell. The new revenues will be spent wisely, on education and transportation. The money will be earmarked, wink wink nudge nudge.

Just ask Senate President Stanley Rosenberg — oh that’s right, he’s not the president anymore. He’s been banished to the State House basement, that bourne from which no traveler does return. Because this is the way it always ends on Beacon Hill.

They can’t help themselves.

Order Howie’s new book, Kennedy Babylon, at howiecarrshow.com

This Fusion GPS hoax is going to be a bigger political scandal than Watergate.

Think about it — Hillary Clinton and the DNC paid big bucks to the dirty tricksters at Fusion GPS to concoct an utterly bogus anti-Trump “dossier.” Hillary’s 35-page smear was then handed off to corrupt FBI agents and DOJ employees who were themselves accepting money from either Clinton cronies or the smear artists at Fusion GPS, who by the way were also being paid by the Russians at the same time.

And then the crooked FBI took Hillary’s fake dossier to a secret federal court and used it to obtain a warrant to spy on Clinton’s opponent Donald Trump and his associates during the 2016 presidential campaign.

In his wildest dreams, Richard Nixon never imagined setting up a police state this corrupt.

What if a Republican administration and candidate had done this to a Democrat candidate — say, Barack Hussein Obama? Instead, it was Democrats doing it to a Republican, so the alt-left media stifled a collective yawn and spent last night screaming at us that Haiti is really a very nice country.

We are close to finally getting to the bottom of this Clinton-Obama-FBI conspiracy, now that Sen. Dianne Feinstein has leaked the 312 pages of testimony of the shady fictioneer who runs Fusion GPS, one Glenn Simpson. DiFi released this because she thought it would prove Russian collusion, and it did.

You see, at the time Simpson was being paid by Hillary Clinton, he was also working for a Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin, the far left’s boogeyman du jour.

More than a year after the dodgy dossier was first published, it has become clear that most of the statements in it are either a) unverified, or b) false, mostly b). But then, Simpson seems to have a problem with the truth, even when he’s testifying before DiFi’s Senate committee.

Simpson said that the FBI had a “walk in” from the Trump campaign who volunteered information about the “collusion.”

Except, the bent G-men didn’t. It turns out, that was a “mischaracterization,” the synonym of which is lie.

Simpson was asked if any effort had been made to verify what even former FBI director James Comey dismissed as a “salacious and unverified“ report.

“By its very nature the question of whether something is accurate isn’t really asked. The question that is asked generally is whether it’s credible. You don’t really decide who’s telling the truth.”

In other words, they just make it up. If you’ve got the cash, Fusion GPS will provide you with a dossier, very official-looking.

To produce this “intelligence” for Hillary to use against Trump, Simpson hired a British “spy” named Christopher Steele. Simpson said this fiction writer, I mean spy, can spot “disinformation” a mile away.

In all the fake-news “dossier” stories over the last year, the pivotal event is always the meeting in Trump Tower involving Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, campaign manager Paul Manafort, and a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya. That meeting took place on June 9, 2016.

Would you care to guess who Veselnitskaya had dinner with on June 8, 2016?

That’s right, the guy who was paid $1 million to produce the dodgy dossier, Glenn Simpson.

Would you care to guess who Veselnitskaya had dinner with on June 10, 2016?

That’s right, Glenn Simpson.

One of the GOP Senate staffers asked Simpson about that amazing coincidence.

Simpson said he never knew she met with the Trumps until he read it in the papers. Honest, that’s what he said. You can’t make this stuff up — unlike the dodgy dossier, which they could, and did.

Worse than Watergate, far worse. You read it here first.

Order Howie’s new book Kennedy Babylon at howiecarrshow.com.

Instead of railing against ­“s---hole countries,” President Trump probably should have stuck with the approach he took last year while discussing the Muslim countries that are flooding the U.S. with terrorists.

“We have to stop this until we can figure out what the hell is going on.”

The problem, of course, is that this torrent of immigration from the Third World includes a wildly disproportionate number of terrorists, drug dealers, gangbangers and illiterate non-English-speaking beggars who are angrily demanding handouts. No one can deny that.

Let’s talk about their crime first, then welfare.

Just before Christmas, the Justice Department released statistics on the population in federal prisons — 31 percent of the nation’s 185,507 inmates in custody of the Bureau of Prison are “known or suspected illegals.”

Can you imagine the numbers in state prisons like, say, California or New York, where the Democrat governors refuse to release the damning statistics on illegal-immigrant crime — for obvious reasons. And 90 percent of the U.S. prison population is locked up in state or local pens.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission releases statistics on federal crimes committed by immigrants, both legal and illegal. In all, immigrants represent 8.4 percent of the adult population residing in the U.S. Yet, between 2011 and 2016, immigrants accounted for 42.4 percent of kidnapping convictions, 31.5 percent of drug convictions and 23 percent of money-laundering convictions.

To paraphrase George W. Bush, they’re only committing the crimes Americans can’t be bothered to commit anymore.

One of the countries Trump referred to was El Salvador. Ever since he decided to end their “Temporary Protected Status,” these foreign mendicants have been complaining that they can’t go back to El Salvador because it is, basically, a s---hole country.

The day Trump made his allegedly shocking remarks, the feds rounded up 17 more MS-13 illegal-immigrant Salvadorans who “report to MS-13 in El Salvador,” according to the DEA press release.

On Friday, in federal district court here in Boston, another illegal-immigrant MS-13 gangbanger from El Salvador pleaded guilty to unlawful reentry. His name is Elenilson Gonzalez-Gonzalez (you can call him “Gonzalez” for short.)

Remember, in dealing with these criminals, the feds often allow them to plead down to simple “unlawful entry” or some such felony. Which means those stats from the Sentencing Commission aren’t really an accurate picture of the horror they’re committing against Americans.

Here’s another headline on a Friday press release from the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston: “Dominican National Sentenced for Heroin and Fentanyl Conspiracy.” How about this DOJ press release, from Connecticut: “Uzbek National Living in New Britain Charged with Immigration Offenses.”

More celebrations of diversity from the you-know-what nations, as reported by the DOJ in Connecticut: “Nigerian National Admits Role in Business E-Mail Compromise Scheme.”

This latest controversy erupted during negotiations over the Democrats’ insane scheme to protect 800,000 illegal-immigrant criminals they call “Dreamers.” Their dream, our nightmare. A Harvard researcher set up a website and surveyed 2000 of them — 73 percent live in welfare-eligible households.

Now do you understand these illegal-immigrant dreamers’ dreams? To remain on welfare, forever.

Last month the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that allowing these freeloaders to remain in the U.S. living on the arm would cost taxpayers $25.9 billion in welfare over the next decade. And they would only generate $900 million in taxes. In other words, most Dreamers will never get off the dole.

If we don’t do something about this insanity, America is gone. It’s going to turn into a, well, do I have to spell out what kind of country we will all very shortly be living in?

Order Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon,” at howiecarrshow.com.

Gov. Charlie “Tall Deval” Baker makes $151,799.96 a year.

That makes the state’s CEO merely the 2,669th highest paid person on the state payroll.

If you’ve been wondering why the hacks on Beacon Hill are whining that collecting $100 million a day in taxes isn’t nearly enough, you have to check out the entire 2017 Massachusetts state payroll, posted in this column online.

It’s party time in state government. Let the good times roll, especially at UMass. Almost all the state’s top “earners” are now interred in academia. The state police are likewise doing fabulously but at least they’re out on the road every day, and while they could run into problems, you might be happy to see a trooper some cold winter night when your car breaks down on the Pike.

Your Tax Dollars at Work: 2017 state payroll

But UMass? C’mon. At least now we know why they call Amherst “Happy Valley.” What’s not to be happy about, when the starting salaries seem to be hovering around $150,000?

Presiding over this academic hackerama is the former congressman, Marty “Midas” Meehan. Midas Meehan checks in at No. 5 on the top earners’ list at $614,381.57 a year. The quartet ahead of him are likewise UMass “employees.”

Let’s talk about the UMass basketball team. Until last March, the Redmen were coached by one Derek Kellogg, a local boy made, if not good, at least rich. He was fired after a 15-18 season but still finished last year seventh in total pay, $585,955.94. The new coach is Matthew McCall, and he’s No. 27, making $381,577.22 in 2017.

The hoop squad’s record so far this season is a glittering 10-8.

How about UMass football? They went 4-8 last fall, and Coach Mark Whipple made $492,654.

All of which reminds me of what Bill Veeck, the legendary baseball executive, used to say of the sports world: “It’s not the high cost of talent that’s ruining the game, it’s the high cost of mediocrity.”

And that goes double — make that triple — for Midas Meehan’s UMass.

I checked out the list expecting to find it chock-full of familiar payroll patriots who’ve been slurping at the public trough forever, and yes, they’re there.

Jim Julian, a second-generation Billy Bulger hack who’s survived multiple UMass presidents since, is at No. 29 — $377,883.01 as “executive vice president.”

And there’s Ed Lambert, former DCR hack and ex-Fall River mayor at $191,028.11 — he’s the “vice chancellor governmental relations & public affairs.” Lambert is No. 835.

But to reach the motherlode of usual hack suspects — the district court judges, the clerks, the commissioners, legislators, etc. — you have to scroll through more than 1,300 names of people you have never heard of, all of whom have very important sounding titles that include endless combinations of three or four of the following words — associate, deputy, dean, assistant, provost, vice, senior, chancellor, executive, chief, director, chairman … .

Remember that obscene pay hike the legislators handed themselves a year ago? Even after taking all the heat to set himself up for life, House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, the unindicted co-conspirator, still finds himself unable to rise above No. 2,336 — $157,499.58.

How about the Mass. Gambling, I mean Gaming, Commission?

They have a UMass-like pay scale. Edward Behosian makes $185,000 as executive director and the “ombudsman” John Ziemba is at $137,815.51. But my favorite is Steve Crosby, No. 2,128 at $161,522.12 — this guy is a coat holder’s coat holder. I remember when he was holding Mayor Kevin White’s coat in Ward 20 back in the ’70s, and he has held so many more coats, cloaks and capes since then.

Back in the day, when gangster Whitey Bulger was stuffing envelopes full of cash for the Yuletide season, he used to look up with a demonic smile and say, “Christmas is for cops and kids.”

Now Whitey would have to say, “Christmas is for cops and kids — and UMass.”

And for UMass, every day is Christmas. And the taxpayers — we’re their Santa Claus.

Order Howie’s new book Kennedy Babylon at howiecarrshow.com.

There comes a night when the best get tight, Rudyard Kipling once wrote, and that night came Monday for a thirsty payroll patriot by the name of John A. O’Leary of Bolton.

I don’t know if he’s one of the best, but O’Leary sure was tight, if you believe the state police report about the 48-year-old $94,471.29-a-year ADA in the open and gross hackerama that is the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office.

For those of you keeping score at home, that salary means O’Leary ranks as the 17,431st-highest paid state employee in the commonwealth. Or did rank, because I have feeling his coat-holding career is over. But he leaves behind a quote that will long be remembered in the Worcester County halls of justice, where the only justice is in the halls.

“It’s in my left hand … .”

O’Leary was driving his 13-year-old daughter to dance class in Boylston Monday evening, according to the state police report, when his Audi was observed “aggressively swerving … almost striking the guardrail.”

Now, just as a haiku must have 17 syllables, all OUI reports must contain certain phrases, for instance, “extremely red, glassy, bloodshot eyes.”

But it appears that O’Leary was above and beyond.

Let us pick up the trooper’s narrative, beginning as he “requested the operator to provide his license. O’LEARY (John) stared blankly at me and slowly began to stutter, ‘It’s in my left hand.’ O’LEARY displayed a heavily slurred voice and there was nothing in his hands.”

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

The crime-busting prosecutor then exited the vehicle “extremely unsteadily” with an “extremely heavy odor of alcohol” and was asked again for his license.

“O’LEARY stated again in a deeply slurred voice, ‘It’s in my left…’”

Next came the roadside Olympics — field sobriety tests — and the man who will henceforward be known as “Lefty” gave the trooper a chance to use some more police-report boilerplate, namely, he “stared blankly” after which “he continued to stare blankly.”

As Lefty fumbled through his pockets, the trooper wrote, “I observed O’LEARY to have an extremely heavy odor of an alcoholic beverage emanating from his breath, even while standing outside.”

Lucky he wasn’t charged with impersonating a Kennedy, in other words.

But wait, it’s almost time for what always happens with these Worcester DA hacks.

“At this time, O’LEARY made spontaneous utterances that he was a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office in Worcester.”

Translation: “Do you know who I am?”

And of course, this tawdry tale of a tosspot can only end in one way.

“At 9:40 PM, O’LEARY passed out sitting upright in the booking room chair and was audibly snoring.”

Somebody should really check the ice-making machine in Joe Early’s office, because his hacks surely seem to be ingesting a lot of bad ice cubes lately. First it was Alli Bibaud, the one-time toll taker who followed her hack judge father, Tim Bibaud, into gainful unemployment in the Worcester County DA’s office.

They take care of each other, just like they did in the Imperial Raj of Rudyard Kipling’s poem — “Sentry shut your eye … we’ll help him for his mother/and he’ll help us by-and-by.”

To put it another way: what happens in Worcester stays in Worcester. Or used to, anyway.

But you want to know who did Lefty O’Leary contribute to? Records show he gave $600 to his boss Early, $500 to ex-AG Tom Reilly, $350 to ex-AG Marsha Coakley, and most importantly, $350 to disgraced ex-Lt. Gov. Tim “Crash” Murray, whose own automotive rendezvous with destiny came on I-190, when his state Crown Vic went airborne at 108 mph.

Take it away, Rudyard: “For the wine was old and the night was cold….”

Or as Lefty O’Leary might say, “It’s in my left…. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

Buy Howie’s new book, Kennedy Babylon, at howiecarrshow.com.

She was only selling illegal immigrant heroin dealers the driver’s licenses that Americans could no longer be bothered selling.

So why are the feds packing a thieving Dominican named Evelyn Medina off to Club Fed for 15 months?

Don’t they understand that, as her lawyer put it in Medina’s sentencing memo, by selling driver’s licenses to foreign drug dealers, she was merely “providing people like herself who were looking for a new life outside their country a quick and easy ‘route’ of entry in the United States.”

A route, specifically, to the welfare office, where they could join others in unlawfully accessing EBT cards, TANF, Section 8 housing, Obamaphones, WIC, MassHealth, etc.

The Registry of Motor Vehicles is to illegal immigrants what the Pearly Gates are to heaven. Once you get through, you never have to work again.

Which was why Medina was part of an organized crew operating out of the Registry in downtown Boston, selling fake driver’s licenses and state IDs to illegal immigrants flush with cash from, well, you know where they get it from.

Last month an illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic was sentenced to two years in prison for masterminding the scheme. And this week, Medina, a hack clerk at the Haymarket RMV, got her 15 months in the slammer, but not before her attorney filed a 10-page sob story about her life and hard times in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.

Now 56, Medina and her family arrived from the DR and landed in a non-working-class neighborhood in Boston in 1977.

“Although Ms. Medina had not yet the language of her new home, she quickly assimilated.

“While she was in high school, she began dating Jose Rosa and from that relationship, her first daughter, Emely, was born.”

Sadly, marriage to Jose was not in the cards — EBT cards, that is.

“Approximately nine (9) years after the birth of Emely, her second daughter, Lismany, was born.”

Medina’s lawyer is Brad Bailey, the former Republican high sheriff of Middlesex County. I called him yesterday and asked if she’d come over illegally, and he said no. I asked him if she’d ever been on the dole and he declined to answer.

According to the feds’ press release, in return for payoffs, Medina and a number of other RMV clerks who have also pleaded guilty were providing licenses for “illegal aliens, individuals who were previously deported, and an individual who admitted to previously facing drug charges.”

But she only received “limited ‘compensation,’ ” as Bailey put it.

“Ms. Medina received between $300 and $500 for each of the identification documents she helped procure, which the government alleges totals at least 15. As such, it cannot be said that Ms. Medina was solely motivated by greed or personal enrichment.”

No, she was just trying to help her fellow foreign deadbeats get a leg up.

“Ms. Medina earned a meager $2,400-a-month salary while employed at the RMV.”

Still, at least behind it was going to come the kiss in the mail. But now “those retirement benefits will almost certainly be forfeited. Because of the manner through which she lost her job, unemployment compensation is also unlikely.”

Sad, says Bailey, because except for her crime spree at the Registry, this proud Democrat has “otherwise lived a laudable life which would give hope to any immigrant coming to this country.”

Indeed.

Buy Howie’s new book, “Kennedy Babylon,” at howiecarrshow.com.