In politics, this sorry year was true to itself, right up until the very end. It was a year epitomized by boasting, lies, smears, back-stabbing, insults, threats and whining — and I’m only counting America’s top politicians, and what they’ve done since Nov. 8. The phrase “political leaders”? It was an oxymoron in 2016.

Too young to sound like a curmudgeon and too old to want to hear any more of their self-serving talk, I find myself hoping we’ve seen the last of the baby boomer presidential candidates, a cohort that includes Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump at one end of the spectrum — born in the mid- and late-1940s — and Barack Obama, a child of the early ’60s, at the other.

A simple question poses itself: Can anybody in this crowd just shut up? Oh, yes, one guy, George W. Bush. He knows how to keep it classy. You don’t hear much from him, and I miss that man more each day.

Am I engaging in “false equivalency” here? That’s the favorite dodge of my disaffected liberal pals these days. To them, Trump trumps all. Trump’s tweetsüber alles, and all that. OK, I get it. Government-by-Twitter is appalling. But The Donald is new to government. Ms. Hillary has been in public life for nearly half a century, so what’s her deal? And what possible excuse do two-term presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have for acting like seventh-graders?

Where should we begin?

Let’s start at the White House, with the current incumbent, because once again he’s given us such maddening misdirection. Remember when it became apparent that the Obama administration was going to be succeeded by the Trump administration? What a bitter pill that must have been inside the White House, especially since Trump ran against the president as much as he did against the Clintons.

Obamacare? Toast. The Iran nuclear deal? History. Don’t get me started on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yet, there he was, this cool customer we’d admired since 2008, keeping it real, saying the right things in the aftermath of Election Day. He even reminded us — well, to be honest, he’d never really talked about it much before — how great Dubya and his peeps had been during the 2008-09 transition. The O-man had perfect pitch.

Come to think of it, Hillary Clinton’s concession speech wasn’t bad, either. It took her 12 hours to give it, but given how shocked she was by the result, that’s understandable. “Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country,” she said. “I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.”

In those halcyon hours, Donald Trump rose to the occasion, too. He promised to be a president “for all Americans” in a victory speech that New York magazine, not exactly a pro-Trump outlet, pronounced “shockingly gracious.”

So where did things go off the rails?

It probably started when Hillary Clinton began handicapping her loss. Asked how she managed to let the likes of Donald Trump defeat her, she was only too happy to point fingers: the Russians, she said. And FBI Director James Comey. Besides, I won the popular vote — and did sobigly. This became a mantra for Clinton and her surrogates. Russian hacking, FBI incompetence, the stupid Electoral College.

This rap didn’t go down well with The Donald, who isn’t known for having a thick skin anyway. Regarding the tension between the popular vote results and the Electoral College, Trump suggested that if he’d campaigned in California and New York — two states he wrote off — he might have won the popular vote. That’s doubtful, but it’s a legitimate rejoinder to disingenuous Democrats pretending that state-by-state voting is some strange new wrinkle they only heard of on Nov. 9.

Trump didn’t leave it there, though. He also took two others tacks: First, he said he won the Electoral College in a historic “landslide.” Then he added, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Those statements were obvious whoppers and they incensed the media. But by then the Democrats were off and running in crazy different directions of their own.

First, Team Clinton associated itself with a Green Party recount effort in some of the close swing states. Meanwhile, grassroots leftists and Hillary’s Hollywood pals began a campaign to bully, beg or beseech Electoral College voters to violate their own oaths, state party law, and the will of the people in their states — and become “faithless” electors.

Remember Las Vegas? When Trump refused in his final debate with Clinton to tell moderator Chris Wallace that he’d abide by the results of the election? “That’s horrifying,” Hillary said. Turns out, she didn’t mean that. She suddenly got very coy on this whole “faithless” electors scheme — as did President Obama.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton got in on the act, too. He repeated the mantra to reporters — Jim Comey-Russian hackers-Hillary won the popular vote — before adding that Trump “doesn’t know much.” But one thing Trump does know, Bill added, “is how to get angry white men to vote for him.”

This might have been more persuasive analysis coming from a more disinterested party, not to mention someone who didn’t sound like an angry white man himself, but whatever. By now you know, dear reader, that Trump just couldn’t let it go.

“Bill Clinton stated that I called him after the election. Wrong, he called me (with a very nice congratulations),” Trump tweeted. “He ‘doesn’t know much’ … especially how to get people, even with an unlimited budget, out to vote in the vital swing states (and more). They focused on wrong states.”

Meanwhile, the only adult in the room decided the unruly kids were having more fun than the teacher. Yes, Obama started opining on the 2016 election, too, saying he was “confident” that if he’d have been allowed to run for a third term he’d have defeated Trump. This statement was a work of art, really, a nasty little bank shot that simultaneously took out Hillary, her campaign advisers (presumably including Bill), and Trump.

Trump responded, natch. “President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me,” he tweeted. “He should say that but I say NO WAY! — jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.”

As it turns out, the president and his secretary of state were working on leaving an actual, as opposed to rhetorical, lump of coal in The Donald’s Christmas stocking. Without bothering to tell leaders of their own party, let alone the president-elect, John Kerry and Obama apparently conspired quietly with — dare I say it, Russia and other U.N. Security Council members — to condemn Israel’s settlement program on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

Trump tweeted about that, too, but this is a whole different deal. A lame duck president changes U.S. foreign policy in a way that hurts an ally and doesn’t reflect the views of a majority of Americans or even his own party? That’s actually worth getting angry about, and shows why Trump needs to pick his spots.

Who cares whether Obama could have beaten Trump. That’s the fantasy world. Israel’s safety is a real-world concern. Happy New Year, everyone.

Carl M. Cannon is executive editor and Washington Bureau chief of RealClearPolitics.