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The West Wing sang its final hur­rah on Sunday night with the series finale Tomor­row. On its own it was a pretty aver­age epis­ode (John Wells wrote it), but it will be forever air­brushed not only with the aura of a series finale but the end of a bril­liant pres­id­ency. The ideal­ism and defer­ence for pub­lic duty that was an integ­ral part of Sorkin’s West Wing shone through, (as did Sor­kin, who made a cameo appear­ance at San­tos’ inaug­ur­a­tion) and that is all fans could have hoped for.

Keen observ­ers would have noticed on Jed Bartlet’s book­shelf “Soci­ety Must Be Defen­ded” : Lec­tures at the Col­lege de France, 1975 – 1976 by Michel Fou­cault Kings of South Beach The Center­fold Girls

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I’ll leave it to TV crit­ics to debate what this might sig­nify. But note to the real Prez in case he decides to take the lead of his fic­tional coun­ter­part and, uh, read: Though Soci­ety Must Be Defen­ded “deals with the emergence…of a new under­stand­ing of war as the per­man­ent basis of all insti­tu­tions of power,” it is not a how-to manual.