When Kate Clinton talks about the recent presidential election, she makes a sound that starts off as a sigh and ends in a laugh.

It’s “bad for us,” she says, “but good for me.”

That’s because Clinton, as outspoken about her left-leaning politics as her homosexuality in her stand-up comedy act, knows she’ll have four more years to turn the Bush administration into new material.

After all, this is the woman whose Web site (www.kateclinton.com) serves as home ground for The Permanent Standing Committee to Impeach George W. Bush Inc. (Its motto: “Bringing down the government used to be a crime; now it’s a job.”)

“I’m living in a conspiracy theory,” Clinton says. “It’ll be a while before I believe Florida or Ohio.”

Count on plenty of Bush-bashing Saturday night at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, when Clinton — who’s been dubbed The Unimpeachable Madame President of Queer Comedy — performs her one-woman comedy show.

The political bent is part of Clinton’s evolution as a stand-up. Some 20 years ago, she left a career as a high school English teacher to build a name for herself on the comedy club circuit. She found her niche in queer comedy — which, pre-Ellen DeGeneres, was still pretty taboo.

She played to college campuses, earning the occasional bomb threat, and along the way found herself spending less time in front of the ol’ faux-brick backdrop of the stand-up world and, instead, more on bigger and bigger theatrical stages, performing one-woman shows (“Correct Me if I’m Right,” which ran off-Broadway, and the touring “Y2K8”) when not writing a book (1998’s “Don’t Get Me Started”) or columns for The Progressive and The Advocate magazines.

Over the years, as culture attitudes have loosened over homosexuality, Clinton’s audience has blossomed. She’s found more material not in talking about being lesbian but, rather, describing the world from her vantage point. She isn’t stuck on gay jokes anymore.

“When I first started, in the ’80s, if something gay happened, you could talk about it for five years,” she says. “Now, I feel like I’m barely ahead of the game. Which is great, actually.”

These days, Clinton’s looking at the election and doing her best to deflect criticism that says activist gays and lesbians served as the magic bullet that ignited the red states and, as a consequence, re-elected the president.

“It wasn’t us,” Clinton says. “We were perfectly used by Karl Rove. We were the wedge issue of this election. Although I do have to say, if a 2005-year-old Christian identity movement is scared of us, is worried about us — excellent.”

Clinton says she doesn’t mind that her act can sometimes dabble in righteous territory, where applause drowns out the chuckles. Audiences lately, she says, have left her shows less amused than relieved. She calls herself a one-woman USO tour for a traumatized nation.

Of course, she isn’t above cracking jokes that earn what she calls “we’re (expletive) laughs”: “They start clapping,” she says, “and they think, we should be crying.”