This is a posting that warns you what to avoid and how to endure the campaign wackiness known as the Silly Season.

We’re now in the Silly Season.

Political consultant/analyst Michael Murphy Sunday on Meet the Press coined the phrase. It’s the time before the political conventions and the announcements of the Vice Presidential candidates.

He’s right. No one’s paying attention to the real issues. Instead, the candidates, their staffs, and the media act like school children waving their hands to get the teacher’s attention.

As a result, the media and the pundits are picking over every little word that is spoken or written. What nonsense about Jesse Jackson. The Reverend Jackson doesn’t like Obama talking about responsibility when he himself has shirked responsibility by fathering babies out of wedlock.

The New Yorker inspired frenzy with the satirical front cover also fails to mention cogent issues. Instead, the editors are poking fun at the right-wing nut-cases (that’s redundant many times) who seem to think Obama is working for Osama, Saddam, and a resurrected version of the 1960s Black Panthers.

The best response to the New Yorker cover was, again, from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. He said Obama should have responded that he’s not upset about the cartoon depicting him as a Muslim because only crazed Muslims respond angrily to cartoons. Brilliant.

Granted, this is high brow humor. You can say that the majority of the people in America are too stupid to understand the joke. It’s hard to argue against that. However, I think most people are also too busy dealing with the economy to be thinking about the cleverness of an insider magazine.

Speaking of the economy, here’s another example of the silly season. Phil Gramm, the former Senator, said America is going through a “mental recession” and we’re a bunch of whiners. That cost him his gig with the Mac camp. Now you understand why Gramm could only win an election in George Bush’s Texas.

Here’s the truth. Gramm was right one out of three times – which is only a good average for a baseball hitters and politicians. First, there is not a recession …technically. We haven’t had two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Second, he’s wrong that this down-turn is mental. It’s real; just look at gas and food prices. That’s not to say some irrational fear hasn’t caused some volatility in commodities and stocks.

But Gramm is right about the whining. We’re not getting our clocks cleaned by India and China because of unfair trade practices. No, we’re being taken to the cleaners because we lack the education of Chinese and Indian workers who will work for less.

Here are the issues no one is really talking about yet – that should be talked about: taxes and the wars. And here is the reality on both.

John McCain says he won’t raise taxes. If you speak to any respected economist –and I have – then you will know that taxes are going up in 2009. And it doesn’t matter who is president. You can’t deny the math. We have an incredible deficit that is growing because we’re fighting two wars. The reason we’ve been able to fund the war and our debt is investors from China and Dubai. We could be beholden to them. They are the creditors and we are the debtors. Granted, they will probably not hurt their biggest customer, but they have started to gain a foothold into our economy.

Unless we want more economic power to leave us, then we need to own more of our country. And that means paying taxes and reducing our debt. Sure, reducing taxes stimulates growth. But we’re facing a looming Social Security and Medicare nightmare that we have not addressed.

Meanwhile, Obama says he will work to bring the troops home in 16 months. He has softened this stance over the past week. (More on flip-flopping later.) It won’t happen. We have no idea what the situation on the ground in Iraq will be 16 months into the new Administration. The chances of democracy, and therefore stability, flourishing there are as probable as Tiger winning the British Open this year.

Furthermore, we’re in Iraq to protect the oil. If you think we only went into Iraq to overthrow a dictator because he was ruthless to his people, then why haven’t we invaded The Sudan to defend Darfur? The main reason we’re in Iraq is to keep our economy flowing.

Let me be clear before the right-wing whackos (again that redundancy) call me a liberal shill. Oil wasn’t the only reason we’re in Iraq. We needed the intelligence. By starting a war, we were able to gather the world’s jihadist nuts (another redundancy) into one place to bring them out of the shadows. The effort has succeeded in many ways. However, it’s a rather cruel way to do it – especially if you’re an Iraqi citizen. Many of your countrymen are sacrificed to root-out the bad guys.

Back to the main point. Unless we come up with an alternative to oil to run our cars, our homes, and our businesses in the next year or two then we’ll definitely have troops in Iraq for a long time.

Let’s calm down over flip-flopping. Both candidates will look like a mackerel pulled from the Atlantic during the silly season. Obama is running to the center. McCain, oddly enough, has to run to the right to gather the core of the GOP. As a result, both candidates will say what it takes to please the majority of voters. The candidate who is the most artful at articulating the nuances will eventually gather steam after Labor Day.

How do you combat this?

My first suggestion is FactCheck.org. This is a non-partisan, non-profit website I highly recommend. They take apart both sides. The Washington Post has a blog called The Fact Checker which is also very good. However, if you think it might be too liberal (which it isn’t) then stick with FactCheck.org. These are both free.

Another suggestion: start thinking globally. One site to research is Stratfor.com. Their intelligence is fairly reliable, based on my experience. The editors and writers look at issues through a geopolitical framework; where a country sits geographically will help determine how the country responds politically, economically, and militarily. Stratfor.com is a subscription service.

So is The Economist. I think it’s the best news magazine in the world. It’s London-based, so it has a partial European view of the world. So, Americans will get a slightly different angle on stories. But more importantly, The Economist looks at things economically.

Stratfor.com and The Economist are good checks on the mainstream media here. They won’t necessarily contradict the reporting stateside, but merely fill in the gaps.

 

---