With all the smutty news coming out of Hollywood and Washington, DC, I find myself wondering when anyone finds the time to get any work done.

I’m reminded that I was walking through the room the other day and my wife was engrossed in watching re-runs of “Mad Men,” a TV series that recounted life on Madison Avenue at a time when the advertising industry was in its ascendency. You could hardly pick up a newspaper or a magazine in the ‘50s and '60s without reading worrisome analysis of the industry’s influence on the American public. When people weren’t worrying about the Soviet Union nuking us, they were fretting about subliminal advertising that was selling shaving cream and potato chips to our subconscious.

As it happens, I was working as a copywriter for a while in the '60s, but I was in LA, where things were more relaxed than in New York, where, it was alleged, nobody would leave his desk, or his office door unlocked, lest the copywriter or art director in the next office sneak in and swipe his ideas.

In any case, whenever “Mad Men” is on TV and I am anywhere in the vicinity, it seems to me that some ad executive is seducing or being seduced by a secretary or a model. I asked my wife if these people ever do a lick of work.

As to a child, she explained that it is a nighttime soap opera, and, as such, offices are merely a backdrop to non-stop hanky-panky.

Well, judging by the news these days, the entire country is currently immersed in one big soap opera.

The only bright side to all this is that after decades of covering up and dismissing the sexual shenanigans of Jack Kennedy and his brothers, along with those of Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bill Clinton, who used Monica Lewinsky as his personal humidor, the media is finally catching liberal whales like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Al Franken in the net.

I am particularly giddy to see Franken being hung out to dry. It always astounded me that he somehow managed to carve out a career as a comedy writer and comedian when, even before I knew his politics, I found him as funny as a funeral.

This was a man who thought devising a Saturday Night Live sketch in which he would drug and rape Lesley Stahl was hilarious. He also wrote an article titled “Porn-O-Rama” for Playboy, which apparently left little to the imagination.

Afterwards, in a book I assume he expected nobody to read, he admitted that when he apologized for these excursions into his depraved psyche, he was lying, explaining he was merely trying to placate potential Minnesota voters, just as he’s doing now in the wake of the disgusting allegations made by Leeann Tweeden.

Although I doubt that Sen. Franken will resign his office or that Sen. Schumer will demand it or that the toothless Senate Ethics Committee will do anything more than admonish him to go forth and never sin again, Franken will never be able to live down the fact that after he grabbed and kissed Ms. Tweeden, she nicknamed him “Fish Lips.”

I believe all 99 senators should immediately begin referring to him as Sen. Fish Lips. There are worse things, after all, than being booted out of public office.

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I keep hearing that European nations are gearing up for future terrorist attacks because those who fought on the side of ISIS are returning to France, Italy, England, Germany and Belgium. The obvious question is why they are being allowed to return. But, then, I am still shaking my head over Angela Merkel’s having been re-elected Chancellor of Germany after her open-door policy towards migrating Muslims has led to a soaring rape and murder rate in her country. Just further proof, I suppose, that people get the leaders they deserve.

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How is it that after all these years, the Supreme Court still hasn’t gotten around to determining the legality of mayors and governors flouting federal law by turning their cities and states into sanctuaries for illegal aliens? Making matters even worse, they then lie about the economic advantage to American citizens of having all these unskilled, illiterate and unacclimated people in their midst.

They could make a stronger case if they offered sanctuary to bank robbers and kidnappers. At least, an argument could be made that the fugitive felons would be spending their ill-gotten loot in local businesses, whereas Latinos subsidize foreign economies by wiring a fair percentage of their earnings back to their relatives in Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala.

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I’m sure that Ivanka Trump had her heart in the right place when she declared that she had no reason to doubt the women who have made allegations of sexual impropriety against Roy Moore.

For all I know, the women might be telling the truth. But they might not be. We have seen several of these cases proven entirely false, especially the rape charges on college campuses. We have also seen claims of racial harassment proven to be bogus. Just recently, at a prep school connected to the Air Force Academy, it was discovered that the anti-black hate signs on the wall were all the work of a deranged black student.

At least, in the matter of Al Franken, the fool had himself photographed acting out his piggish behavior.

Even if I grant that Ivanka Trump had the best of intentions, wouldn’t the timing of the allegations, a few short weeks before a senatorial election, at least cause her to entertain even the shadow of a doubt?

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I understand the political instinct that caused Ivanka’s father to put in a good word for the three UCLA basketball players who were caught red-handed shoplifting in China, but I think he overreacted.

For one thing, he now owes Xi Jinping a favor. You never want to be indebted to Mafia dons or Communist dictators. For another, the three guys committed a crime and they should pay for it. If they weren’t previously aware of Otto Warmbier’s fate after he was arrested in a hostile nation, it can only be that, being college athletes, they spend all their time reading basketball playbooks and beating off coeds with a stick.

If China had saddled them with 10-year sentences of hard labor, Trump could have stepped in. But he should have let things take their course. Coddled college athletes get away with enough without adding larceny to the list.

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In case it hasn’t reached you yet, there is a video making the rounds on the Internet showing Joe Biden getting way too close and personal with a series of pre-pubescent girls. If they were merely snapshots, they could be dismissed as having been photo-shopped. But these are videos. What’s more, I saw some of this stuff in real time on TV. But when you see him in action every few months, it doesn’t really register. When you see the scenes one right after the other, it is hard to ignore the feeling that you’re watching a pedophile in action.

It is the single creepiest piece of film I’ve ever seen in my life.

If the liberals are seriously thinking about running Biden against Trump in 2020, they’d be well advised to think again.

Once the DNC derails his political ambitions, the Democrats can always claim that they simply decided that Biden would be 80 years old, and that despite all the face lifts and hair transplants in the world, 80 is still 80.

If I know the Democrats, in 2020, they’ll ultimately decide to go with a younger, fresher candidate, but one who has survived in the rough-and-tumble trenches of political warfare; someone like, say, 73-year-old Hillary Clinton.