Joe, to whom his son left nothing in his will, is the architect of the star’s final world tour, putting him on display like a freakish piñata. Joe also disrupted a weird press conference this week to promote his record label, unable to resist waiting a millisecond to profit from what is shaping up as the biggest celeb death of the decade.

This is why Joe Jackson is my Celebutard of the Week – in keeping with my book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians who are destroying America. (Kensington.)

In his life, the superstar was clearly damaged beyond repair, reconfiguring his face and allegedly sleeping with underage boys. You need to look only as far as Jackson’s relationship with his father to understand where it all began. Jackson has said in interviews that his father was a tyrant, beating him mercilessly if he missed a dance step, ridiculing his dark skin and wide nose.

Michael Jackson’s pop talent was undeniable. So was his status as a predator. He seemed unaware that there was anything wrong with reliving one’s childhood through the company of young boys.

Had Joe Jackson been a better father by even one-tenth, would the world have had a Michael Jackson? He was his creation, as well as his failure.

One thing father and son have in common: Neither seemed to believe his chosen hobby is wrong.

Michelle Obama really, really likes life in the White House, what with all the toadies and underlings scampering under foot. The mystery is how did she ever manage before life as Mrs. President?

Here’s what she said about her “current life’’ in the White House: “[It is] a very blessed situation, because I have what most families don’t have — tons of support all around, not just my mother, but staff and administration. I have a chief of staff and a personal assistant, and everyone needs that.’’

She could have stopped there…or not…

“Everyone should have a chief of staff and a set of personal assistants,” Mrs. O gushed.

But wait, there is a punchline:

These lines were spoken at a conference for “Corporate Voices for Working Families” in Washington. Working families who, presumably, don’t actually know what a chief of staff does.

This is why Michelle Obama is my Celebutard of the Week, such as those in my book, “Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who are Destroying America.”

Perhaps chiefs of staff for the spoiled First Lady in your life will inspire a new growth industry in a time of recession. Still, I have to wonder: Who does the laundry for the chief?

Yet the uncouth actress will never be punished, vilified or marginalized, because she openly disparaged the one ethnic group which enjoys no Hollywood protection. That would be white people. Particularly, white people from the South.

What do you think would happen should anyone turn the tables, reverse the races, change the geography, and denigrate an urban person of color? The conservatives I know do not resort to gutter talk. 

For her bold and unbridled racism – offenses that are sure to draw deafening applause by the American left – Janeane Garofalo is my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book, “Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America.” 

Given a forum to comment on the previous day’s tea parties, in which hundreds of thousands of conservatives gathered to protest President Obama’s tax policies, she had the gall to declare,

“This is about hating a black man in the White House.” Huh?

“This is racism straight up.” She was just getting started:

“That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. And there is no way around that. And you know, you can tell these type of right wingers anything and they’ll believe it, except the truth. You tell them the truth and they become-it’s like showing Frankenstein’s monster fire. They become confused, and angry and highly volatile. That guy, causing them feelings they don’t know, because their limbic brain, we’ve discussed this before, the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person, and it’s pushing against the frontal lobe. So their synapses are misfiring. Is Bernie Goldberg listening?”

So there it is. Anyone who believes higher taxes would be ruinous to this country is deemed dangerous. Anyone who disagrees with any policy Obama might enact is racist.

Not just racist, but a “teabagging redneck.” That sure shuts down the debate before it can get off the ground. Which is the entire point.

I think I’ll have a T-shirt printed. “Teabagging Redneck Against Taxes.”

I wonder if Janeane would try to lock me up?

Question: What do you get when you cross an American icon such as Academy-award-winning director and former kid actor Ron Howard with the continent of Europe – and shake with double doses of celebrity idiocy?

Answer: A baguette-eating Celebutard.

Oh, Opie! From Mayberry to Hollywood. How did you stray?

Back when he went by the name Ronny Howard, the star gained fame and adoration by playing the ultimate American rural tyke, Opie Taylor. He was a kid so obnoxiously clean, he’d agree to go to bed without supper before he’d ever denigrate his country.

But decades of Hollywood success have turned Opie into some kind of groupie for the hate-America crowd that thrives overseas. This is what he said on Friday night’s “Real Time with Bill Maher”:

“…at a certain point I don’t think we’ll be so consumed with being the pre-eminent super-power and, you know, driven by sort of militarism and this need to export, you know, democracy.”

Dang that democracy, boy!

And this is why Ron Howard is my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberal and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America. (Kensington).

Opie is not the first dim-witted ‘tard to get sucked into the European view that American values – life, freedom, democracy and decent customer service – are less than desirable.

But I haven’t quite seen a guy of his age (55) come back from summer vacation changing his tune, and his nationality, so completely.

Howard, who’s promoting “Angels & Demons,” a sequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” said:

“I’m a very optimistic person and I don’t want to feel like there isn’t growth, but there needs to be an adjustment anyway.” He blamed his new-found disdain for American freedoms on his time spent filming in Europe.

“I’ve actually spent a lot more time in Europe and working with crew members and actors and understanding how they live and how they think.”

Howard said he’s “very optimistic” about the future of America, so long as the nation makes an “adjustment,” and becomes “more progressive.”

In recent months Howard, for the first time, opened his mouth on things political, making a pro-Obama videotape.

How would Obama feel about his latest diatribe? The president is up to his neck dealing with terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. No telling how he’d react to Opie’s “progressive” ideas for pulling back on the export of, you know, democracy.

 When Madonna showed up, via private plane, with her personal trainer and assorted underlings, hoping to snatch yet another evidently healthy child to add to her growing, international brood – and fill a hole in her soul left vacant by the departure of a husband, and soothe her jealousy over other starlets’ ability to save the world – Malawi did something unprecedented. The country said, through a judge, “Take your millions and your treadmill and your vegan diet, and scram!”

“Whaaat!” cried Madonna. You have no idea whom you’re up against, Malawi!

And this is why Madonna is, for the second consecutive week, my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America. (Kensington.)

Judge Esme Chombo of the Lilongwe High Court rejected Madge’s bid to get her hands on four-year-old Mercy James, who lives in the same orphanage from which Madonna helped herself to David Banda in 2006. The judge smacked Madonna’s hands like a errant child, saying you can’t just jet in here and take off with a child like so many trinkets. Malawi has a law that adoptive parents must live in the country 18 months to two years, and the judge was not going to look the other way.

“The issue of residence, I find, is the key upon which the question of adoption rests, and it is the very bedrock of protection that our children need; it must, therefore, not be tampered with. As wisely put by G. K. Chesterton: ‘Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.’‘’

Madonna, who doubtless believes Chesterton has something to do with the manufacture of cigarettes, planned to further strong-arm the country into giving her what she wants. She vowed to appeal. And she observed her rejection with a workout on the treadmill she’d had flown to the pricey lodge where she stayed, sipping Lafitte wines rather than closer-grown South African varietals.

The judge wrote: “Ms. Madonna may not be the only international person interested in adopting the so-called poor children of Malawi. By removing the very safeguard that is supposed to protect our children, the courts by their pronouncements could actually facilitate trafficking of children by some unscrupulous individuals who would take advantage of the weakness of the law of the land.

“Anyone could come to Malawi and quickly arrange for an adoption that might have grave consequences on the very children the law seeks to protect.”

The family-oriented people of Malawi were concerned about not only Madonna’s recent divorce, which ended the idea of Guy Ritchie being the second parent in the child’s life, eyebrows were also raised by her affair weeks ago with a 22year-old model named Jesus.

Mercy’s grandmother has already said taking the child would be akin to “stealing,” and human rights groups have accused her of “manipulating” the adoption process with money and fame.

But she has proven that she is tone deaf to the poverty and pride that embrace Malawians in equal measure. For example, as Madonna’s entourage took the three-hour drive to Mercy’s orphanage, the singer instead stayed behind to indulge in her two-hour workout with her imported personal trainer, Josh, reported London’s Daily Mail. She followed her staff to the orphanage by private plane – at a cost of about 10,000 British pounds.

Her obliviousness to the real needs of the people continues to show. She will push kabbalah down the throats of kids at a school she plans to build, something in which Malawians are not interested. But most egregious, she intends to build her school on a plot of land that is occupied by villagers who already are starting to get excited over selling their land to the superstar. (The chief was promised $4,000). But what happens when the money runs out, and there is nowhere to go, no land to farm?

Kabbalah will take care of them, I expect.

This is why Madonna is my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book, “Celebutards: the Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America,” (Kensington).

Madonna is asking a judge to let her adopt 4-year-old Mercy James, a child who, like David, has a biological father but no mother. Her grandmother was incensed.

“Why doesn’t the singer pick other children?’’ fumed Lucy Chekechiwa to the Sun newspaper in London.

“It is stealing. I want to go to court. I won’t let her go.’’

It seems a repeat of her earlier adoption. The granny fumed, but Madonna still plucked the child from his home and took temporary custody. On her own turf, the adoption was a done deal. She also broke Malawi’s adoption laws, which prevent prospective parents from getting their hands on children without first living in the country for 18 months. Technicalities.

One has long wondered if Madge is fit to raise a house plant, let alone a child.

Her vegetarian diet, free of wicked dairy products, should be enough to preclude her from raising ice-cream-deprived kids. It comes with great remorse that her ever-expanding brood, which includes Lourdes, 12; Rocco, 8; and little David, 3; will never, at least in childhood, taste the summer staple.

But in the diet-crazed Celebutard world, this is par for the course — Gwyneth Paltrow gets to keep her little ones even after publicly cleaning out her gastrointestinal tract. Money buys anything. Including flesh. TV is also banned in the house of Madonna, 50, which might be a blessing; the kids are protected from their mothers’ egregious sexual actings-out –- at least until the babysitter breaks the rules.

But why should I complain about dairy products when, in 2003, Madonna took the stage at Radio City Music Hall in New York where, in full view of then-husband Guy Ritchie and 7-year-old daughter Lourdes, tongue-kissed Britney Spears and Christian Aguilera, giving an advanced lesson in sex education. Child service authorities looked the other way.

The environmentalist – she made the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green’’ issue – also imported 1,000 unfortunate pheasants to her British estate, Ashcombe House, so that rich friends including Brad Pitt might pay $19,000 a day to shoot the poor birds to death.

Mercy lives in same orphanage from which she plucked David. She wants the little girl to join a brood whose size has yet to be curtailed, despite Madonna’s ridding of a husband Guy Ritchie and discarding of Lourdes’ baby daddy, Carlos Leon. It is not known whether the new child’s health will be carefully screened in Africa, as was David’s. With millions of orphans afflicted with AIDS and other diseases, Madonna got herself a good one.

David, like Mercy, lost his breast-feeding mother as an infant, and the family, unable to afford formula for him, put him in an orphanage, expecting to take him back after he was old enough to eat solid food. But Madonna chose the bright-eyed youngster. The case against Madonna was closed when she told her adoption story to a credulous and approving Oprah Winfrey. “God bless you!’’ cried Oprah.’’ She also condescended to David’s dad, Yohane Banda, as a “simple’’ man. (Ouch!). 

Reportedly, David’s father upset when he learned Madonna was divorcing. Too late.

In return for Africa’s generosity, Madonna founded Raising Malawi, a girls’ academy that preaches hefty doses of Madonna’s pet belief system, Kabbalah. She might have simply made a large donation to the Bandas’ extended family, including a grandma and aunts, so they might be reunited with their biological child. But what do I know about Hollywood?

This begs another question: What is wrong with American-born orphans? Mixed-race children, for example, badly need parents, even rich ones – and can be taken home without the need of an international plane flight.

I guess those kids don’t make such good conversations with Oprah.

Robert Redford likes to play the nation’s Environmentalist in Chief, making the wildly earnest claim in last week’s Huffington Post that he was “too early on solar power.’’ He boasts, like a self-absorbed prophet, that he promoted clean energy way back in his filmmaking hey day of the 1970s. He even gave a shoutout to Barack “Special Olympics’’ Obama, who in his State of the Union address “noted that although America invented solar energy technology, we have fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it. He is right of course’’ Never mind that Redford, self-proclaimed savior of the earth, probably promotes the burning of more fossil fuel than virtually any other single American outside of Mobil. Or Al Gore, whose Nashville estate burned 20 times the national average in fuel. Obama, too. 

This is why Robert Redford is my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book – Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America (Kensington).

Redford founded a ski resort in Park City, Utah, a particularly environmentally unfriendly venture in which rich folks routinely travel from points afar – and they’re not riding in hot air balloons. He also started the environmentally ruinous Sundance Film Festival, an SUV-choked venture that annually pulls in countless Gulfstream jets full of busy film executives to the remote and pricey environs, where hot air is expelled, unharnessed, into the atmosphere.

As contrarian former columnist John Tierney noted in the New York Times, if Redford really cared about the environment he’d move his festival to New York City, which would “spare [movie makers] a trip, enrich our economy and save energy.’’

Nonetheless, Redford urges Americans to do as he says, if not as he does. He wrote, “I remember when America was leading the pack on clean energy in the 1970s. We abdicated that leadership thanks to the influence of a fossil fuel industry with deep pockets and friends in the White House. But Obama reminded us of an important aspect of the American character: ingenuity. We are a nation of innovators, and we can harness that resourcefulness again to build a better future.’’ 

This, of course, came after Obama winged it out of Washington while the economy burned like so many coal stoves. He took Air Force One – the large, Boeing 747 version — out to Long Beach, Calif., for his disastrous foray on the Tonight show that resulted in his personal apology to the head of the Special Olympics, after he compared his bowling skill to that of physically challenged athletes. Even George W. Bush, a global-warming skeptic, took the smaller, 757 version of Air Force One on his last trip to California.

Wrote Redford, “I saw that ingenuity emerge three decades ago, when the promise of renewable energy became clear to many of us. We were so eager to spread the word about solar power that we created ‘Sun Day,’ the solar equivalent of Earth Day. We had events from Maine to Chicago to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir even agreed to participate in one event. People were just starting to get excited about pollution-free power, but then Ronald Reagan became president and took the solar panels off the White House and the policies promoting renewable energy were stripped from the books.’’ 

That’s right, Robert, blame a Republican. He fails to mention that President George W. Bush called on not just America, but China and India, two far worse polluters, to cut down emissions that folks like Redford and Co. blame for global warming. However, it’s become as fashionable as a hybrid Hummer to blame the United States for the world’s dirty air. 

“I was too early in my efforts to promote solar power, but now is the time. We are getting a second chance–another American trait. If we don’t seize this moment, we will be too late to get the competitive advantage in a global marketplace, too late for the economic dividends, and too late to stave off the worst of global warming,’’ he wrote, probably from a hilltop in Utah. 

I wonder how he got there? But that would be impolite to ask.

The dead-serious jokesters who run Hollywood’s favorite terrorist organization, PETA, whose members are known to toss red paint on women wearing perfectly good fur coats, and enforcing punishing vegan diets on healthy carnivores through a disinformation campaign (meat is cruel! It’ll kill you!) unseen since the days of the Soviet Union or the Clinton administration, are back at it.

And they’re even more hypocritical and weird than Madonna, who pushed a dairy-free diet (no ice-cream for Lourdes, Rocco and little David!) while importing 1,000 pheasants to her British estate for the purpose of allowing rich guests to shoot the poor birds to death.

That’s why the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book, Celebutards, the Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America (Kensington).

Last week, PETA’s strange president, Ingrid Newkirk, wrote to George Clooney asking that the star allow a vial of his perspiration – essence apparently taken from a gym towel swiped by a crazed stalker during Clooney’s recent visit to Washington – to be used as seasoning for the bland foodstuff tofu. It would be marketed as “CloFu.” PETA’s scientists were quick to assure all those now retching that the stuff would taste delicious. I could not make this up on a very large bet.

Wrote the Newkirk to the Clooney: “The technology actually exists to take your perspiration and make it into George Clooney-flavored tofu. We could do that and give the tofu away.

“Of course, your fans would swoon at the idea of eating CloFu, but what interests us most is that we would attract many people who don’t try tofu because they worry that it would be bland or that they wouldn’t know how to cook it. CloFu will help people be healthier and more environmentally friendly and will spare animals from being killed for the table.”

Proving that clinical insanity is contagious, PETA spokeswoman Amanda Schinke said, “We believe CloFu would be delicious on its own or served over rice with a light soy sauce and sauteed collards, in a casserole with melted vegan cheese and olives, or perhaps pressed with vegan pesto in a panini.”

Mmmkay….

Clooney’s response was not terribly encouraging to PETA. The card-carrying celebutard, whose love of Darfur is trumped only by his hatred of America (see his anti-U.S. conspiracy flick Syriana) proved he nonetheless still has two brain cells to rub together when it comes to insane vegetarians.

“As a mammal, I’m offended,” quoth Clooney.

Clooney’s perspiration apparently was harvested during his post-inauguration trip to D.C., in which he privately bent President Obama’s ear on the bleak situation in Darfur. I guess they didn’t want CloFu there, either. Anne Curry, who traveled to the region with Clooney, also can’t subsist on an all-Clooney diet. Pity. Osama bin Laden would lap up the stuff.

Jackie Kennedy did it graciously.

Hillary Clinton did it grudgingly.

First Ladies have reinvented themselves into softer, gentler, more user-friendly versions of their former ornery selves since the dawn of TV. But none has done it so radically and dramatically – and quickly – as Michelle Obama, relaxing the arches of her disturbingly angry eyebrows, covering her naked upper arms, and putting a figurative muzzle across her disapproving lips. She has emerged, butterfly-like, as vacuous and silly as any chick you’d meet in a shopping mall. And she’s performed this metamorphosis with the expert encouragement of your friendly neighborhood celebutard, Oprah Winfrey.

And that is why Michelle and Oprah take home the honors as my Celebutards of the Week, in keeping with my book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America. (Kensington).

As he moved into the presidency, Barack Obama had a serious Michelle Problem. She said not once, but twice, after Obama took the Wisconsin primary: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.’’ The lefty firebrand evidently was ready to move to Canada previously. But where would she buy her sleeveless dresses?

In 2007, she famously told 60 Minutes, “…The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know…’’

I wondered if Michelle was suggesting that gangs of racist whites might go after Obama – or whether his supposed attacker was a more statistically significant African-American man. She never said.

Enter Oprah.

Oprah had a little foot-in-mouth disease on her resume. She called herself the victim of racism – suffering a “Crash Moment’’ – after she was denied the right to shop at the outrageously expensive Hermes boutique in Paris the night she arrived after closing time.

But Oprah had moved millions of votes into the Obama column, and she was all about rehabilitating Michelle, too. By inauguration day, the incoming First Lady had softened the arches of her infamous eyebrows. The sleeveless dress that showed off her gym-toned arms that appeared, to snorts of derision, in her official White House portrait, suddenly went the way of the hoop skirt.

More dramatically, the woman bred at Princeton and Harvard Law gleefully engaged in vigorous chick chat with Oprah in her magazine, O.

They talked interior decorating.

The White House “will reflect our family,’’ quoth Michelle. “I want comfortable sofas, I want art that reflects contemporary and traditional, I want to bring in new American artisans. And you’ve got to be able to make a fort with the sofa pillows! Everything must be fort-worthy.”

Michelle said the inauguration reminded her of getting married. No mention of taking pride in America here.

“It was almost like a wedding,” she said. “A huge, very complicated wedding. The last visitors didn’t leave until Sunday [after the inauguration]. And then the first Monday was kind of weird. You know: Now we live here, and Barack is getting up and going to work, and it’s just us. This is our home now.”

Now, the only “danger’’ she sees for her family now is in the White House kitchen. 

“The pie in the White House is dangerously good.”

I never thought I’d say this. But the old, unpredictable Michelle was way more fun than the Stepford model.

It was the performance of Jeremy Piven’s life. Last week, he tearfully persuaded five fellow actors that he was deathly ill from mercury poisoning due to his lifelong love of sushi – and not merely slacking off with Britney – when he abruptly walked away from the Broadway production of “Speed-the-Plow.’’ I predict future actors will have “no raw fish” clauses attached to their contracts. Entire A-list restaurants will tremble at the loss of high-profile business. On the bright side, fish will live.

Piven dodged a financial bullet by pleading his case to a grievance committee of Actor’s Equity. He could not escape the hilarity that ensued over his fishy tale. As “Plow’’ playwright David Mamet joked to the New York Post’s Michael Riedel, “My understanding is he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer.’’

This is why Piven is my latest “Celebutard of the Week,’’ in keeping with my new book, Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberal and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America.

Piven got in trouble with producers of the Broadway show in December, who allege that he’s just another spoiled, egotistical (or is that redundant?) Hollywood jerk. Two months into the show’s run, Piven, who won three consecutive Emmy awards co-starring as hyperactive agent Ari Gold in HBO’s “Entourage,’’ simply refused to show up onstage for his lead role, plunging the $3.5 million production into chaos and upsetting co-stars Raul Esparza and Elisabeth Moss of “Madmen” fame. 

The Great White Way is not nursery school. Nor is it pampered Hollywood. Hard-working thespians and hoofers tend to look askance at people who’ve grown too big for their britches, even if their seams are busted by excessive quantities of uncooked seafood.  Producers of “Plow’’ brought Piven up on charges with the actor’s union, claiming that Piven’s abrupt departure hurt the play. Piven had simply told producers he was sick and hopped the first flight back to Los Angeles, announcing he wasn’t coming back. Actors simply don’t do this. When they get sick, they are expected to negotiate their returns to the plays they leave.

Of course, Piven’s well-documented days and nights of hard partying did not sit well with cast mates or crew (the guy crashed Britney Spears’ birthday party!) Also, as The Post reported, Piven called several prominent actors in the days before he hightailed it out of Broadway, begging them to take over his role. And still, the show managed to end its run in February in the black.

Piven was so concerned about the effect the hoopla might have on the remainder of his career, he traveled to the dreaded Theater District last week to tell the Equity committee of five actors and five producers that his problem was mercury coursing through his bloodstream, and not other substances.  Piven contends the mercury level in his blood was five times normal, and he risked having a heart attack if he stayed. He cried before the committee deciding his fate, proving he still has his acting chops intact. The actors took his side. The producers did not. Without a unanimous verdict, the producers were screwed.

He wasn’t finished. Piven immediately took his case to no less an authority than The New York Times. Sitting for an interview as a publicist babysat, he twice broke into tears and quoted the Obama administration’s warning about mercury pollution as a national threat. He also quoted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “No lie can last forever.’’ It had something to do with his ruined reputation.

Now, the whole mess goes to arbitration, where producers will continue to try to get restitution

Piven’s stage career, by the way, is kaput. His Tony award, once considered a lock, is up for grabs. I wonder if raw fish – or Britney – was worth it..