If you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, you know that potshots aimed at the disabled are back in favor. This is not the first time our entire demographic has been slandered — for too much ADA regulation, too many government handouts, or just a pain in the libertarian back end. Given that there are 14 people running for the Republican nomination for President, including Donald Trump’s hair, and 90 percent of them are small-government believers, we of the disabled class might find ourselves in the crosshairs for a while. We may even come in for some mild rebuke from Hillary Clinton, but since she has yet to make a policy speech or let a reporter ask her a question more serious than How do you like our Iowa pork? — it’s hard to know.

Leave it to Rand Paul, the one candidate who seems to speak his mind, whether you like it or not, and in general, doesn’t like the government giving people money, full stop. Campaigning in New Hampshire last week, he laid it on the line when it came to “safety net programs”: “Everyone in this room knows someone who is gaming the system. Over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts. Join the club. Who doesn’t get a little anxious for work every day?”

Note: these comments came from video shot by a Democratic opposition research group. “Fifty percent of people on disability are cheating dogs” may become this year’s “47 percent of Americans are deadbeats.”

Whether Rand’s statistics are true or not, the strategy here is clear. Anyone in the audience might have walked away, saying, “Gosh darn it, that’s where my tax money is going — to a bunch of conniving crybabies in wheelchairs! Boy, that burns my bonnet!”

This is burgeoning stereotype — the disability cheater. Who is he or she? What’s the most egregious crime these scofflaws have committed? A penny ante scheme of making a few grand a year in a government shakedown? Hey, man, Bernie Madoff has got nothing on you.

The first thing that comes to mind are those local news reports with grainy video showing some guy collecting disability for his debilitating lumbago as he’s bowling in a league championship. That’s stupid to get caught like that, but it’s not going to anger millions. If you were around in the early 1970s, you might remember the dreaded “welfare queen.” Ronald Reagan often alluded to the real-life example of one woman from the South Side of Chicago who had 12 social security cards and was drawing veteran’s benefits from four patriotic but nonexistent dead husbands. The implication was that this super-queen was not unique, just one of millions of such ghetto gamers. (They were always black and always women.) Someone else came up with the image of a welfare queen driving her brand new Cadillac down to the welfare office to collect her 12 checks, and that’s what really stuck in the minds, and craws, of Middle America. It became the stuff of a thousand political cartoons.

They haven’t come up with that kind of deeply resonating image of the disability cheat yet, but I bet someone’s working on it. The fat guy with the trick knee loading up 90-pound bags of Quikrete at Home Depot is a start, but it needs something like a Cadillac El Dorado or gold jewelry to really sell it. It’s got to be more upbeat, more aspirational. The archetypical disability cheater should be living it up on those felonious checks, hanging out by his infinity pool, drinking Crown Royal, fending off buxom beauties while having a faux sword fight with his crutches. Something like that would make millions envious and angry.

While we await our moment as the welfare queens of the future, just know that Rand Paul is not alone in working this angle. Pundit Anne Coulter recently opined that people in wheelchairs should be barred from entering the United States and applying for citizenship. That’s all we need, she snarled. More low-lifes gorging at the Federal trough, and they don’t even speak our language!

Bottom line: These hardballers are picking on an entire class of people who often have severe needs — and virtually no political voice. Now that really burns