I yield to Norm in my dislike of Madeleine Bunting's colums, but I am particularly scornful of a typical error in her piece today.

The argument of the piece itself need not detain us. It's the usual Bunting/Grauniadista/stopper drivel. But there's a telling error in it, which shows a total lack of understanding of even the basics of American politics.

The word neocon has been turned into a catch all shorthand for anything and anyone with which and with whom anti-Americans disagree. As such, the word has become meaningless.

Ms Bunting writes this in one paragraph:

William Buckley, the renown American neocon

(Ignore the fact that she means renowned.)

Eh? I think the word is howler. Clearly Ms Bunting has contempt for American conservatives per se. But that should not prevent her from trying at least to gain a gain a basic understanding of who they are and what they think.

William Buckley, the founder of the National Review, is often referred to as the father of American conservatism. If Ms Bunting thinks that he is a neocon - or, more likely, has simply not bothered to find out one way or another, labelling all American conservatives as neocons - or that the National Review is a neocon journal, or even that being a neocon (especially in the US) is the same as being a Conservative, as per Mr Buckley, then she quite literally does not know what she is talking about and her columns are demonstrably even less worth reading then one might already have thought.