Last night, author Maurice Sendak appeared on “The Colbert Report.” The interview was like fiery balm  for everyone tired of politicians and their talking points.

Maybe it’s because Sendak is a cantankerous old mensch (much as yours truly hopes to be one day) who needs neither money nor attention, but Sendak gave one of the most pleasingly honest interviews in a long while – not an easy thing to do with the slick Colbert (who was backpedalling as soon as he found out that Sendak was gay; how could a gay man write…children’s books?).

Of children, the world-renowned grump, cane in hand, who wrote “Where the Wild Things Are” had this to say: “I didn’t set out to make children happy or make life better for them, or easier for them.”

Oh, and this: “I like them as few and far between as I do adults. Maybe a bit more, because I really don’t like adults at all.”

Book signings: “Dreadful”

Groupies: “They don’t mean anything.”

His hobbies: “I don’t go to the movies.”

“The reference to “wild rumpus” in “Wild Things”? It’s sex, of course. Sendak is pretty obviously fond of sex, unlike the fascists who tried to ban his “In the Night Kitchen” because it contained pictures of naked boys. Colbert had a solution to this problem that Sendak did not think was very smart.

When Colbert pointed out that Newt Gingrich thought kids had it easy these days, Sendak countered by calling Gingrich “an idiot of great renown. There is something so hopelessly gross and vile about him, that it’s hard to take him seriously.”

As for a Colbert-proposed sequel with Vin Diesel and Burger King tie-ins, a mock-up of which he brought to the interview? Sendak thinks it’s “the most boring idea imaginable,” but he is fine if Colbert wants to try it. “But it’s got to be as bad as that looks like it i,”

The impatience, bluster and anger are priceless. I want this man in the White House, wild things and all.