You wouldn’t listen to her advice.

"Tell me what I need to know," people often say to me. "Here is what you need to know," I answer.

—Suze Orman, The Road to Wealth

How a bottle-blond former waitress and self-described "55-year-old virgin" with a taste for the good life became the financial messiah for millions of Americans might be a fun Lifetime original movie. Why the masses continue to invest their faith in Suze Orman in the wake of a financial meltdown she never saw coming is a more timely question. The answer is complicated.

If you've managed to avoid Orman over the past decade, you don't watch Oprah, CNBC, or PBS, and you've probably never entered an airport bookstore, where her toothy, cougarlike visage graces the covers of numerous best-sellers, the latest of which, 2009 Action Plan, has more than 1 million copies in print and has, according to her publisher, been downloaded 2.2 million times at www.suzeorman.com. There, you might also be convinced to open an Orman-sponsored TD Ameritrade brokerage account or buy one of the products that she also sells on QVC, including: the Suze Orman FICO Kit Platinum Version w/Action Planner ($47.70); the Suze Orman Identity Theft Protection Kit w/Anti-Spyware ($39.78); and Suze Orman's Organize and Protect Financial System ($66 plus S&H; Easy Pay! Installment plan available).

Orman is that most modern breed of capitalists, the human-industry, self-mythologizing. "Suze has a unique grasp of the role money plays in our lives, as well as the gift of timing: she tells us exactly what we need to know, precisely when we need to know it." So, at least, claims the jacket copy of one of her books. She addresses her fans either as "my friends" (learned from John McCain, perhaps?) or as "girlfriend." Although she published a comprehensive—and very useful—guide to personal finance in 2001, her first two best-sellers focused on the "emotional roadblocks" to financial freedom. Suze has a lot to say about emotional roadblocks, among other things: "Falling in love is simple—or so it often seems in retrospect"; "Tears are God's way of forgiving you"; "You will never achieve a sense of power over your life until you have power over your money"; and "The stock market is like a pot of soup."

She has less patience for statistics. Although study after study has shown that personal bankruptcies are caused primarily by catastrophic events like divorce, job loss, and, above all, medical bills and that most of us are struggling with a gap between our income growth and the soaring cost of necessities like housing, Suze tends toward psychological causes that invariably blame the victim. Who is struggling these days, according to Suze? "People who grew up without much money and later earn a comfortable living sometimes spend too much to make up for what they didn't get as children. ... People who feel entitled to the good life, or are unconsciously copying a mother or father who lived beyond her or his means. ... If you feel the need to impress people with what you have rather than with who you are, you are at high risk for credit card abuse." This from a woman who spends $500,000 a year chartering private jets and who sells "Cruise With Suze" packages on an Italian luxury liner. (She has also hawked for GM, claiming that leasing a luxury car—you know, the kind that people drive to impress others—is a terrific financial decision: "If you ask me, that's smart money!") No wonder she winks more than Sarah Palin, girlfriend.

But it is not Suze's hypocrisy or even her intellectual laziness that really bothers me; no, that would be something Suze "loves" called "dollar cost averaging," which involves buying the same stock over and over again as it falls. "It's a great opportunity for you when the value of the shares drops," claims Suze in the inaptly named The Road to Wealth, "because you can buy shares at ‘bargain' prices and average down your cost per share." Oh, where to begin? Maybe with the obvious: Since when does throwing good money after bad make you rich?