- perhaps the single best from the entire seven seasons (which arrived from HMV yesterday, thanks to the earlier thread. £50 for the lot!).

I don't recall who said it recently. but an American commentator hoped that, as they used to do, Americans would once again vote for the man best equipped to run the country, not the man they would most like to go for a drink with. Let's all hope they do.

U.S. presidents aren't really like that any more, are they? They had a good run of them with FDR, Truman, Kennedy and Nixon, but then - no doubt as part of the post-Watergate cleansing of the national soul - it was no longer politically expedient for a president to be "presidential", so the POTUS paradigm changed to something less aggressive and more aw-shucksy, as typified by Carter, Reagan and Dubya. (Bush the Elder was a bit of a curate's egg - yes, he was a former oilman and chief spook, but he also had his klutzy "being inarticulate thing" - while Clinton was LBJ2: they both made their careers by keeping their sharp-as-a-knife lawyering skills well hidden from public view and playing up the good-ol'-boy angle to the hilt.)

The candidate in the primaries who was most like Martin Sheen - and I'm talking about "presidentiality" here, not policy - was probably Rudy Giuliani. And maybe that's one reason why he didn't get very far.

but on the strength of that scene, I am a convert. Excellent.

I will find it harder than ever to watch Bush on TV with his pin-sharp analysis of the financial crisis: "We put forth a plan that was BIG because we got a BIG problem."

In real life:

1) Anyone floating the idea that, on the strength of a few barmy bible stories, Judaism/Christianity’s morality has absolutely no relevance to how a society arrives at its rules and mores would be lucky to make social secretary of the local tennis club, never mind the Presidency. It may bug East Coast liberals, but Christianity is a powerful force in America. And depicting all Christians as gay-bashing morons wouldn’t go down well with the significant proportion of them that are nothing of the sort.

2) Politicians don’t go round humiliating influential media figures in an atmosphere of arrogant, bullying hostility. Not if they know what’s good for them.

3) I presume the woman here is meant to be some Ann Coulter-type bible-thumping right winger. I don’t imagine in real life she’d just sit there soaking up the blows. She’d fight back and give as good as she gets.

Real life isn’t the same as the telly.

Kent Brockman: Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?

Professor: Yes I would, Kent.

The character is based squarely on a talkshow host called Dr Laura Schlesinger - the scene is great although it reminds me of that bit in Annie Hall where Woody Allen pulls out Marshall McLuhan from behind a bush to help him win an argument, then asks "Wouldn't it be great if real life were like that?"