However, I am going to write about King Asshole Numero Uno…Dr. Phil. It’s not really that Dr. Phil’s funny, but he has really pissed me off this time. As Miss Pop Rocks’s readers have most likely seen before, Dr. Phil has a habit of pimping himself out as the Psychiatrist to the Stars. He’s always ready and willing to jump on Larry King’s lap and dish out his country bumpkin shtick on anyone who’s in the news, whether he’s treated them or not. (More often, it’s not.) When he’s not busy screaming invectives at some poor, lost soul on his television show in an attempt to make them “get real,” he’s pathetically attempting to connect with the celebrity world through such stunts as appearing in “Scary Movie 4.” Ick.
Even so, Miss Pop Rocks had been willing to roll her eyes and look the other way, sure that Dr. Phil was a harmless huckster who probably only inflicted immediate damage on the misguided people who became guests on his show (or in his “Man Camp”).
Not anymore.
Dr. Phil, with this latest stunt, I can only say that you’re an opportunist schlub of the highest order, and your decision to take a sick girl’s breakdown and attempt to transform it into dollars and attention for you is practically criminal. You’ve trumpeted your forced-upon affiliation with her on your Web site www.drphil.com and though press releases to “Entertainment Tonight.” That’s sick, man.
You claim you had every right to visit her in her hospital room because her parents asked you to come. That makes me laugh. If you were any kind of shrink, you’d know that it’s those very parents who share at least some of the blame for their daughter’s current predicament, and you’d politely decline their request. Besides, something tells me they have psychiatrists at Cedars-Sinai. Just a crazy guess.
I can’t even give you credit for canceling your planned Britney Spears show Tuesday, as I’m guessing you only did so because your realized the cultural Zeitgeist had really turned against you.
You deserve to have whatever mail order shrink school certificate you earned revoked, and you should go roll your fat, tubby ass back into bed. Quit the show, quit the advice column in O, and go live off the earnings of whatever was left after you settled that class-action lawsuit against your so-called weight loss products.
I would also suggest you follow your own advice and get real, but it’s really so much more fun to tell you to get bent. – Jennifer Mathieu
Wrong as it would have been, I kind of wish he had forged ahead with the Britney show. It would have been ueber-Schadenfreude to hear a somewhat professional and first-hand diagnosis of just wtf is going on in Britney's brain.
Call me callous, but for ten years now people who work for $5.15 an hour have had to stomach the fact that a girl who can't lip synch accurately rakes in millions of dollars. The world is an unjust place. Let those minimum wage watchers of Dr. Phil (and the rest of us, too) have their moment of self-congratulation: we may not be rich and famous, but at least we are not certifiably insane.
And tell Britney, as she returns to her multi-million dollar home and sees herself on the Dr. Phil show, that life is tough.
Posted at: January 9, 2008 10:41 AM