Opinion

Vice city: How ‘Veep’ exposes silly liberal agendas and the inanity of Washington

If the antidote to “Sex and the City” is “Girls,” then the cure for “The West Wing” is “Veep.”

Aaron Sorkin’s motor-mouthed idealists, with their adorable enthusiasm for progressive dogma and their courageous battles against anyone so evil as to disagree with them, have been rendered ridiculous by the much funnier and yet far more credible “Veep,” which just launched its second season on HBO.

And here’s the funniest part: The show that is mercilessly exposing the fatuousness of our government every Sunday night has impeccable left-wing credentials.

“Veep” stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a rising political star whose presidential campaign foundered. She wound up with the consolation price of the vice presidency (in the shadow of a president whom she, in a running joke, never gets any time with).

It takes place in an absurd world in which the Veep is forever frustrated in her attempts to push “clean jobs initiatives” or “filibuster reform” while being stymied by her own gaffes, changing policy priorities, breaking news, backroom political deals and directives from the president.

The show is notable for its many hilarious and usually profane putdowns (“That guy is a weapons-grade retard. I think you might have been hoist by your own retard”), but it’s also a piercing satirical attack on the clichés of politics, the self-aggrandizement of the politicos and the ultimate pointlessness of what they’re up to.

For the last 20 years, Washington media’s shorthand for all of this has been the cliché, “Kabuki theater” — everyone pointing out that everyone is just putting on a show — but “Veep” shows Washington to be more like theater of the absurd. It’s about how some of the smartest, most ambitious people get addicted to political power and spend their lives rushing around for the next fix. Political parties are never identified, because the ruling dogma is simply Washington itself.

Selena Meyer (Louis-Dreyfus) spent much of season one trying to set up a clean-jobs panel that looked like a win-win that would punish oil companies by replacing petroleum-based products with those made from renewable resources. “Polluting corporations. Held responsible by me,” Meyer brags. “Dependence on foreign oil. Ended by me.”

On “The West Wing,” this would have been a noble crusade, but on “Veep” we learn how ludicrous the actual end result would be: A rule change ordering plastic utensils in federal buildings to be replaced by corn-starch forks and spoons. Which melt if you stick them in anything hot. Such as coffee.

It’s a plotline that reflects, and seems inspired by, Washington’s endless, bipartisan green-jobs boondoggles, like bankrupt solar-panel manufacturers and massively subsidized electric cars that run out of power every 20 miles if it’s cold outside. Such as in winter.

Of an august “fiscal responsibility” commission, Meyer notes acidly, “Are you kidding me? Not one of those guys has paid for his own lunch in like a decade.”

Preparing to break a tie in the Senate, she vows to vote, “the way my principles and conscience tell me to go.” Awkward pause. “Which way do you think that should be?”

Cut to: Harry Reid saying he would “vote my conscience” for an assault-weapons ban he previously voted against. So America’s senior Democratic lawmaker has confessed to cynically voting against his principles all those years to appease the gun lobby. Now that the gun-control vote is over, are we meant to believe that he reverts to being just another hack for sale?

“Veep” creator, Scotland’s Armando Ianucci, shares Sorkin’s politics (as does liberal New York magazine essayist Frank Rich, who is one of the executive producers) and proudly backs left-wing parties in real life.

But, unlike Sorkin, Ianucci isn’t interested in writing as a therapeutic exercise in sanitizing history (as Sorkin is, first cleaning up the Clinton years on “The West Wing” and now on “The Newsroom”) to make it a holy crusade of noble progressives vs. slimy reactionaries.

“Veep,” by taking a magnifying glass and a sense of irony inside the Washington sausage factory (Louis-Dreyfuss says Joe Biden’s staffers told her that they have begun referring to various real-life incidents as “ ‘Veep’ moments”), winds up vindicating the conservative view of government.

Which is that DC is just a high-school clique playing with somebody else’s credit card, a nerd army of mini-Napoleons heaving vacuous rhetoric at the suckers (“There’ s no I in freedom,” Meyer says at a rally. “Freedom is not me-dom. It’s we-dom!”) to disguise its main motivation, which is to grab and hold onto power.

kyle.smith@nypost.com