This time Maureen Dowd got it wrong. W’s campaign video shooting on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln just off the Californian cost may be provoking comparisons to ‘Maverick’, the protagonist of Don Simpson’s and Jerry Bruckheimer’s 1985 hit-film TopGun – but it’s dead wrong.

‘Maverick’ is a good cowboy, not a bad one. He’s the bearer of the good America of my youth. He’s the mustang that roams and runs wild in Marlboro country. He’s disregarding the rules until he learns that, sometimes, they do make sense. He loses a friend, then faith, he lives at the edge of despair, but he grows and returns as a wiser man. And, hey, he gets the girl.

We may be not be flying F-14s on a daily basis, but I am pretty sure most of us aspire to be some kind of ‘Maverick’, ‘the best of the best’, in whatever we do.

The screenplay for TopGun II, ‘the Washinton connection’, that Maureen Dowd is proposing today, would not survive any producer’s scrutiny for more than five minutes. No one would want to see a film in which the dull and rational Iceman would become the bearer of truth. Of course, W’s PR people know that, and that’s why they made him play ‘Maverick’.

But he’s not. Or, let’s say – should W indeed be Maverick, we would be only 20 minutes into the film. And I am pretty sure that Ms Dowd is not favoring another seventy minutes of a W presidency, including the question which horrible incident would make W lose faith and self confidence.

Let’s just hope we’ll never know who would have to play ‘Goose’ in the sequel…