How dare you Barack Obama. How dare you sir!

Here I am enjoying a light snack of pastrami, potato chips and wasabi mustard on rye sandwich with a side of a quarter chicken, then I read your comments that America already has one Dr. Phil (implying not to subtly that we don't need another one), and I nearly choked on my meats.

Basically Obama was yapping about how McCain says we're in a psychological recession. And then he mentioned we don't need another me. Frankly I think the connection was kind of a stretch. I mean once I did a show called My Economist is in Stagflation Denial, but that was for a special tax week show, so the connection remains tenuous.

What bothers me the most about this Barack, is as a public figure, I strive to stay apolitical. The other day on a show called My Teen is Using Abortion as Birth Control, I would have liked to share my opinion on the moral and spiritual dilemma, but I stayed diplomatically neutral in the debate -- save for my disapproving glowers at the teen hussies.

The truth is my views on abortion are very complicated. I think a judge -- me -- should decide every single abortion case in front of a national audience. I will take many factors in account: the socioeconomic status of the parents, who the crowd hoots for more, etc. With a little luck it will be a referendum on the national ballot in November.

Readers, it is with a heavy heart that I must confess something: I am living a lie. On my show, I frequently tell my guests, "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt," or "Deny and Don't Conquer," and once I even said: "God will disown you if you keep lying to yourself about your obese baby."

But I have now come to the realization that denial can be a good thing. It can protect you against a lower, more accurate sense of self-worth. And why is that bad?

I'll tell you the moment that led to my epiphany. Like most of my epiphanies, it took place sitting at the kitchen table alone in my underwear eating a ginormous submarine sandwich bigger than my already large head. I believe at the time, I was in a bologna, Cajun turkey, spicy sopressata salami and pepper jack cheese phase. (Many people don't realize the keys to a healthy sex life and avoiding luncher's monotony are exactly the same -- get creative!)

As I nibbled my way through the second half of the sandwich, I hit a powerful food coma. I zoned out and stared at this delicious monstrosity of dairy and animal flesh. Something about the way the light reflected off the spices of the jack cheese and the fat circles in the sopressata, mixed in with the yellow mustard -- and I'll be darned if I didn't see a clown's face right there in my sandwich.

And that's when my repressed memory rushed into my brain like a tidal wave of rusty knives and poison-tipped darts. I recalled a birthday party I attended as a child. Little Dr. Phil had not quite achieved the harmonious balance of fat distribution that you see before you today. Sylvester the magic clown asked for a volunteer that he was going to make disappear. I excitedly raised my hand and was selected.

But when I got on stage, Sylvester roasted me. He said, "I'm going to need some extra magic to make you disappear." The crowd went wild with laughter and Sylvester riffed off it. He said, "Jesus himself would lose a lot of believers if he had to perform this miracle." And then, "You're so fat, when you step on a scale, it says to be continued." I ran straight home and comforted myself with 31 Twinkees. I had to be rushed to the hospital to get my stomach pumped.

Many people come to me for help. They say, "Dr. Phil, my husband and I are both having sex change operations. Can the marriage still work?" Or they say, "My father thinks he's a toaster and won't take the bread out of his mouth." My advice is always the same: come on my show. Nothing heals like being berated by a bald man in front of a live studio audience.

But sometimes the people who need the most help are too afraid, or too Mormon, to ask me themselves. I need to reach out to these people. Like these 13-year-olds who are getting pregnant. Girls, I know you are in a bad place right now, with a lot of people telling you different things, but those people are idiots. I'm going to tell you the right things:

First, lose those dresses. How are you going to get a man who isn't your 50-year-old cousin if you look like you live in a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel? I'm not telling you to dress like the out-of-control pre-teens I had on my show last week, but get mom or your prophet to pick you up some jeans at the Wal Mart.

Look, let's be honest with one another, okay? A lot of people cry. Not everybody cries, though. I don't cry. I haven't cried in 37 years, not since I watched my father hitch to a tractor-trailer and pay a borderjumper to drag him down the expressway. By the time they got him stopped, his whole head was skinless, you see what I'm saying? He wasn't dead, he was just really ugly. He said that's what he wanted. I cried then. I cried a lot, okay? I went in my room and pushed the dresser against the door and sobbed until I thought the mattress was going to collapse from all the water weight. I'm a big guy, see. Even when I was nine I weighed 250. That's a lot of water. And water's good for crying.

 We don't have to film this week so I've been sitting in my underwear all morning drinking coffee and it makes me skittish. I never know what to do with myself when there's no one one else's problems to sort out. I like other people's problems more than my problems.

Anyway, I've gone off topic. Here are Dr. Phil's top 3 favorite ways to keep himself from crying:

Number 1: Put your head against the wall. It can be any wall, but hopefully one not connected to a room containing your meth-head ex-boyfriend or your stepfather, or whoever it is causing you all that sadness in the first place. Just put your head against that good wall and press it there. Okay now give a little pressure. Give it enough pressure that you can feel it in your pelvis but not enough to actually crack the head or something. Now keep pressing. Pressing. Wait ... and, isn't that better?

If you're ever having problems getting out of bed in the morning, and can't develop any fantastic reason of why you should get up and face another day, try thinking this: ham sandwich.

This morning I woke up feeling like garbage. Like some hunk of loser I bring on my show to berate and decry in front of my mammoth national TV audience. But this morning, staring at myself, I looked pudgy and weird. I have a mirror over my bed. No, the mirror is not for sexual pleasures, dang you. It's because nothing helps me drift off to sleep better than a little eye-to-eye with my beautiful bald head. But this morning my eyes looked swollen and my head was stuffed from this cold I must have caught in the studio. My mustache hair was all mussed and wouldn't lay right and I started thinking about how maybe I should shave it off. I've had that mustache since I was twelve! I slapped myself for thinking we should ever part. I slapped myself for being bumrushed by thought of inferiority and self-doubt. Those thoughts are not the thoughts for me! I am a mastermind of personal innovation!  

Still, I did not want to get out of bed. I started trying to think of something that would motivate me—something immediate that would distract from the fact that I had to do three radio interviews that afternoon with loudmouth DJ's and then tape an episode with a girl who had ringworm, which I really just wasn't looking forward to. I couldn't think of anything. I was going to stay in bed all day until I thought of the one magic perfect thing.  

Then I did: ham sandwich.