Mayor Mike Johnston proclaimed, “It is past time Big Tobacco cleaned up the big mess it’s created.”

Yep. Denver is suing tobacco companies for the cigarette butts littering the city.

Because Denver’s Big Mess couldn’t possibly be the fault of the mayor, the city council or the people actually dropping garbage on the ground. It must be the fault of — let me check the Progressive Wheel of Blame here — Big Tobacco.

Ignore the graffiti

When you drive through Denver, the first thing you notice is obviously the cigarette-butt epidemic. Not the graffiti. Not the passed-out junkies. Not the ridiculous plastic bollards guarding bike lanes emptier than a city council meeting on fiscal restraint. Not even the shirtless guy wandering down the middle of a four-lane street, screaming obscenities at himself.

Nope. Cigarette butts. That’s what has Denverites lying awake at night.

Come on, Michael. You know full well Big Tobacco didn’t create any mess at all. Philip Morris executives are not prowling Capitol Hill after midnight, flicking Marlboro filters onto the sidewalk and cackling.

Inconsiderate smokers littered. That’s right, Denverites, your constituents did it.

Is the progressive mind constitutionally incapable of comprehending personal responsibility?

Drunk driver? Sue the automaker and the distillery. Someone stabbed to death? Clearly Big Knife has been buying off politicians. Hateful letter? Institute a three-day cooling-off period before purchasing a pen. Or the current plan, don’t teach kids how to write.

Your colorblind co-worker shows up dressed like a 1977 game-show host? Blame JCPenney for enabling his fashion decisions.

Denver’s real big mess

I deal daily with the litter created by Denverites — particularly Denver’s army of drug-fueled vagrants. Excuse me: “The drug-fueled vagrants currently experiencing un-housed-ness.”

I have only one logical response: “No mayor, it is past time Big Government cleaned up the big mess it has created by refusing to enforce our laws.”

Every day I pick up the debris left by Denver’s finest fentanyl fans around the headquarters of Independence Institute near the State Capitol. Fast-food wrappers. Liquor bottles in every size from “bad decision” to “lost weekend.” Potato chip bags. Syringes. Condoms. And far too often, human feces. (Usually not mine, if you’re wondering.)

Dogs relieve themselves on our grass, but their owners almost always clean it up with plastic bags. Denver’s homeless population also has an endless supply of plastic bags. I know because I pick those up too.

But why use one when the sidewalk is calling your name?

What I rarely —hardly ever — pick up is a cigarette butt.

The other day, beneath our office windows, we cleaned up another pile of abandoned belongings, including a backpack. Inside were a crowbar, a club, pliers, screwdrivers and a tire iron.

It was less a backpack than a burglar’s Swiss Army knife. I now eagerly await Denver’s lawsuits against Black+Decker and REI for causing this particular outbreak of litter.

Suing cigarette companies for their customers’ bad behavior is a sad, pathetic money grab not worthy of the shoddiest ambulance-chasing lawyer.

When virtue signaling rules

But it underscores the hypocrisy that is the new leftist evangelical way of virtue signaling — salvation through litigation, endless public displays of anti-capitalist moral purity at taxpayer expense.

Where is the lawsuit against McDonald’s for all the wrappers? Or Starbucks for abandoned cups? Or Fireball for those tiny bottles scattered across the city like alcoholic Easter eggs? Well, those companies are not currently fashionable to hate … yet.

It’s the lack of simple consistency that blows my mind. We ban shopping bags but not the bags we put our produce in, not to mention the plastic that everything inside the supermarket is wrapped in.

Because somehow some plastic is more evil than other plastic. And only our elite can divine.

How do their little brains not implode by the roaring contradictions?

We outlaw plastic straws to protect sea life, even though a straw discarded in Colorado would have to pull off a prison break from multiple water-treatment systems, navigate half the continent and hitchhike to the Pacific before it could menace a sea turtle.

Meanwhile, plastic tampon applicators escape scrutiny, even though cardboard versions exist.

We all know why. Tampon applicators are used by women, a protected political constituency. Cigarette smokers are a small, unfashionable minority.

So raising the cost of cigarettes by shaking down manufacturers isn’t intolerance. It isn’t bigotry. It’s, um, public health.

And now, “public health” means making the law-abiding pay for the behavior of people government won’t hold responsible.

Jon Caldara is president of Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.