Our poor President. (I'm referring to the outgoing one). He (and we, mercifully) have just 3 days to go. To look at him in photo-ops with the new President, he looks like a child at his own birthday party. He looks like he might actually think the new President's (current) popularity is an extension of his own. He might even believe that his own policies are to continue under the new President.

Of course, in a way he's right. After all, look at the policies coming our way: Pacifism towards Iran -- the same policy practiced by the current Secretary of State under the current administration; expansion of government health care -- the same policy begun by the massive expansion of Medicare a few years back; increased regulation of business -- the same policy instituted with Sarbanes-Oxley, a bill made possible by a Republican Congress and Republican President. And let's not forget the biggest transfer of private wealth to a government in all of human history, last October. Much more of that will be coming, but only because of what happened in October.

Let's face it. What we're really getting is more of the same. While it's easy enough to mock the curiously vacant expression on the outgoing President's face, it's tempting to conclude that he knows something we don't: That he was, in fact, the predecessor to the real thing, the lead-up act for the Anointed One of socialism, who is about to take over the throne of what was once the American republic.

The joke is really on the people who are ecstatic over the new President. They think they're getting something new, cool and different. In fact, they're just getting more of the same: A LOT more of it. They don't seem to know this, or care. They talk in terms of good and evil. The guy who's leaving office, they scream, is evil -- for spending a mere, say, $700 billion on government redistribution. Now, when a new President comes in and decides to spend, say, $1 trillion -- no, make that $3 trillion!  --  on redistribution of wealth -- well, there's a moral man for you! When the "conservative" white guy concedes the free world to Muslim terrorist states, he's an idiotic warmonger. (How they get this, I'll never know). When a new, cool "liberal" guy does the same thing -- why, he's the best thing since ... Jimmy Carter.

When logic goes out the window for an individual, those of us in the mental health profession conclude: There's mental illness for you. When it happens to an entire society, the same conclusion seems reasonable to draw. Under the rule of logic, contradictions cannot exist. Under those who push the new conceptual order, "change" and more of the same are one and the same thing.

In a paradoxical and twisted sort of way: They're right.