By  HOWIE CARR |  howard.carr@medianewsgroup.com | Boston Herald 

Can these Massachusetts politicians do anything anymore except pander and virtue signal? 

From pandemic to panderdemic — everybody’s gotta be more woke than the other guy, or gal. It’s the new normal, as they never stop lecturing us. 

“There go my people,” they say, “I must lead them!” 

As he so often is, President Trump was onto something with his tweet Monday: “The Radical Left Democrats have gone Crazy!” 

And none more so than here in Maskachusetts, and that includes you, Gov. Charlie Baker. 

Politics has become like Tom Wolfe’s old classic, “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” updated by 50 years, with every hack in Massachusetts reprising the role of Leonard Bernstein, groveling white-guilt-ridden millionaire composer sucking up to the Black Panthers in his Upper East Side penthouse. 

Consider the past week, after the rioting and looting in downtown Boston. 

Mayor Marty Walsh, who didn’t put nearly enough cops on the street to stop the violence, suddenly became the spiritual adviser for all white people everywhere: 

“Let’s just listen for a while. Let’s not give opinions. Let’s not criticize. Let’s not judge. Let’s listen.” 

In other words, shut up! 

But if Marty had really wanted to shut up and listen, why didn’t he just … resign? That way, the president of the Boston City Council, Kim Janey, would succeed him as mayor. She’s black and female. 

Has Marty resigned yet, and turned over the keys to the Eagle Room and the Parkman House to President Janey? I must have missed it. 

But the remake of Radical Chic was just getting started. 

Maura Healey, the attorney general, then went to a Chamber of Commerce breakfast and lectured the fat cats: 

“America is burning. But that’s how forests grow.” 

I wonder how she’d react if one of those forests started growing in, say, Charlestown, where she lives. 

This is the same woman, by the way, who was accused by a judge in 2017 of “stonewalling” the investigation of the drug-addict state chemist Sonja Farak, who sent hundreds if not thousands of defendants in drug cases to prison on falsified evidence. 

The judge said that the conduct of Healey’s office in the probe of prosecutorial misconduct was “egregious and harmful to the administration of justice … a depth of deceptiveness that constitutes a fraud upon the court.” 

And how many of those defendants who were framed were … of color, Maura? But that was then, and this is now, right? 

Then Monday night, Sen. Ed “Mr. Frosty” Markey and Rep. JoJoJo Kennedy had a Senate debate that was so anticipated by the voters that the organizers had to hold it out of state, in Providence. 

The two Beltway backbenchers didn’t quite come out for defunding the police, but they danced close to it. They think they have to, for whoever turns out for the primary in September. 

Mr. Frosty, who in the 1970s wanted to ban busing and abortion, now wants to ban tear gas. 

JoJoJo, meanwhile, proposes to get to “the root cause” of why we need police (for this he went to Harvard?). He also wants to cut the police budgets for “education, mental health and anti-violence,” or as his Uncle Teddy would have called it, the War on Poverty. 

You know the old joke. The War on Poverty is over. Poverty won. 

The only blood Mr. Frosty drew was when he denounced JoJoJo for beginning his career working for a Republican, or as Markey put it, “a right-wing Republican.” 

It seems like a hundred years ago now, but this game of “Can you top this?” only began in March — 1,000,000 jobs ago in Massachusetts. Trying to stay ahead of the accelerating PC curve of the coronavirus, Marty started it by announcing he was cutting the capacity of barrooms by 50%. 

The next day, Gov. Charlie Parker raised Hizzoner and called him. 

He shut all the bars. 

The next day the mayor of Somerville, Joe Curtatone, having missed out on the opportunity to close the bars, shut down his city’s playgrounds — in other words, he closed the monkey bars. 

That was a joke then, but it doesn’t seem so funny now. Marty has since canceled the Boston Marathon and the Feast of St. Anthony, Tall Deval has canceled the summer, and Curtatone has canceled, among other things, church, Christmas and celebrations. 

But that still wasn’t enough for Curtatone — now he’s declared a public-health emergency for racism in Somerville. 

Meanwhile, COVID-19 is over, but Charlie Parker just can’t let it go. He’s a one-hit wonder, he’s addicted to panic porn. He continues trudging around the state, talking to “folks” about the “data” — he comes across like an American crooner in 1964, trying to compete against the British invasion. Nobody cares anymore. Everybody just wants them to leave them and their fun alone. 

Tuesday, Tall Deval fled to Lawrence to avoid the press, but he still had to take a question about the WHO basically saying “Never mind” to his mask fetish. 

For six seconds, Charlie Parker stared straight ahead. He was speechless. Finally he mentioned he’d been talking to the “folks” and that the study was based on “very small sample sizes.” 

But not as small as the number of dead in Massachusetts under the age of 50 — 107. 

“I’m enormously skeptical,” he harrumphed. 

So are we all, Tall Deval. That’s why everybody’s turning off the TV news. How much new normal can anyone take without becoming enormously skeptical?