Blame God.

Didn’t an incompetent Texas governor named George W. Bush say that God told him to run for president?

But I believe it was a former mail order guru named Karl Rove who whispered such sweet delusions into Bush’s ears.

Surely God would not leave an oft-blessed America with, in the words of the January Harper’s magazine, a $10 trillion hangover, $10.35 trillion and rising to be exact.

Over the eight years of his reign those hateful French have a word for most everything Bush touched – merde.

The list is legion:

* A preemptive war against Iraq before the Taliban and Al Qaeda had been cleared out of Afghanistan. As one writer cogently labeled the Bush foreign policy, “you become a democracy tomorrow or we bomb the s..t out of you.”

* Cutting taxes on the upper 1 percent of Americans when funds were needed to fight two wars and provide for growing needs at home.

* Privatizing Social Security.

* The use of torture—waterboarding, foreign renditions—in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

* Ignoring and weakening environmental laws.

* Underfunding the No Child Left Behind Law.

Finally, the Bush borrow-and-spend policy has approached the reckoning point. Those trillion-dollar chits soon may come home to roost, landing in the lap of President-elect Barack Obama.

Ben S. Bernanke, while a Princeton economist in March 2005, coined a theory to explain the growing tendency of Americans to borrow from foreigners, particularly the Chinese. The problem, he said, according to New York Times writer Mark Landler, was not that Americans spend too much but that foreigners save too much.

By piling up excess savings the Chinese could lend the U.S. money at low rates, underwriting American consumption.

Bernanke, appointed Fed chairman in 2006, acknowledged the colossal credit cycle could not last forever, but in a global economy it could take years, even a decade, to work itself out, he believed.

That’s before the market crash followed on the heels of the home subprime mortgage scandal.

Nearly every component of the U.S. economy has deteriorated in the eight years since Bush took office, say the co-authors of “The $10 Trillion Hangover” in Harper’s.

Linda J. Blaines is a lecturer in public finance at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and a former assistant secretary for administration, management and budget in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The co-author is Joseph E. Stiglitz, a University Professor of Economics at Columbia University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics.

They note that nearly 4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Assuming those jobs were held by bread winners consisting of two spouses and two children, multiply by four.

“As bad as things are, though,” they write, “this is just the beginning. The Bush administration not only has depressed the economy and racked up unprecedented debt; it also has made expensive new commitments to the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, to disability compensation and education benefits for veterans, to replenishing the military equipment consumed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and simply to paying interest on the debt itself.”

And remember that little war that Bush said Iraqi oil revenues would pay for?

Blaines and Stiglitz say the final price of the Iraqi war is expected to reach at least $3 trillion. Moreover, they write, the “cost of providing medical care and disability benefits may eventually exceed even the cost of combat operations.”

Who’s to blame for electing the worst U.S. president ever? MM (not Marilyn Monroe, but Mainstream Media share part of the blame).

Remember how dull and stiff Vice President Al Gore was depicted in 2000 and what a good ol’ boy Bush was, a guy you’d like to have a beer with.

The New Yorker magazine wrote that Gore spoke in punctuated paragraphs. Bush, in Molly Ivins’ words, used English as a second language.

You get what corporate America and Wall Street paid for, folks.