Oi, Carver- Noooo!

Not again please. Not content with his risible performances on Newsnight, Tom Carver is making errors galore as he attempts what presumably he considers sharp political analysis of the race for the Presidency.

When a journalist begins his article 'John Kerry had it all worked out. A decorated war hero against a Texan gunslinger who had bungled the first war he had chosen to fight. - apparently ignoring as though it didn't exist the invasion of Afghanistan- he has to be either foolish or incredibly sloppy in his thinking. Ok, perhaps Kerry is that sloppy, but it's too rich to have a BBC journalist aping him.

Carver specialises in sarcastic, colourful insults and slanders- which, on Newsnight, he delivers with such a motor-mouth it almost enters the mind subliminally.

Here though we get to take it in slowly as he calls the Bushies 'Yalie frat-boys' and characterises the Republican campaign as butchery. It seems to have, er, escaped his attention that Kerry has been re-christened the Kerrikazi candidate in recent days, being considered a craftsman of his own brand of self-slaughter by many. Kerry was 'lulled' into making his war service central to the Democrat convention, says Carver defensively.

Carver gets worse as he warms up. He says, wrapping two insults into one sentence, 'Americans, always keen to move on to the next thing, are running out of outrage over Iraq.'

So Americans have that famed 'short attention span', and are too shallow to care? This is supposed to be an analysis?

He says 'Iraq's currency as a political weapon is declining.' - something which is as crudely put as it could be. Did it occur to Carver to consider that Americans will warm towards candidates who do not use Iraq as a political weapon but as a solemn undertaking, and that this is really the Dems' problem? That the currency of Iraq will increase when the Democratic candidate shows incontrovertibly he is serious about it?

Carver is probably right when he says that Kerry needs to concentrate on attacking Bush's economic record, but there are several problems with this analysis too. No-one to my knowledge has really given Bush any credit for his management of a largely inherited recession, or made allowance for the massive blow that 9/11 struck to the US economy, or accepted the costs of homeland security and war with Iraq and Afghanistan as necessary evils, and then gone on to say what beyond those things Bush has done wrong. No-one has demonstrated that Kerry will be more fiscally prudent himself should he have the chance. Even where, who knows, the Dems may have a case, it seems like they haven't reached the starting blocks yet.

Coincidentally enough, it would seem, nor has Carver.