Matt Damon hates James Bond, loves China?

Media: I have a feeling if they changed it to America, he wouldn't have objected at all.

Public policy and Santa Claus are not necessarily intertwined in most American households. But for Damon, a fiercely liberal activist who was one of Barack Obama's first and loudest Hollywood supporters (he compared Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy to ''a really bad Disney movie'' and suggested President Bush's twin daughters be packed off to Iraq), politics colors nearly everything. ''What we liked about Matt is that he's Harvard educated, so he's a very smart guy,'' says Hal Weiner, who with his wife Marilyn produces Journey to the Planet Earth, the PBS series Damon has narrated for the past eight years and was working on last week. ``But he's also a little political.'' The Weiners discovered just how political when Damon started arguing with them about some lines he was supposed to read in one episode, which said rising Chinese soybean consumption was leading to slash-and-burn farming in the Brazilian Amazon. ''He really objected,'' Hal Weiner recalls. ``He wanted to make sure we were not just bashing China. We had to bring in some scientists to talk to him before he'd do it.''

Damon met Beardon when he was working as a technical advisor on the grim Cold War spy film The Good Shepherd, in which Damon played a fictionalized version of legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton. Damon has acted in several spy movies, including three as discarded CIA superassassin Jason Bourne, and he has developed some very strong opinions on the subject. Do not, for instance, compare that unctuous James Bond fellow to the misguided but moral Bourne. ''They could never make a James Bond movie like any of the Bourne films,'' Damon says scornfully. ``Because Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He's repulsive.

Compared to the revenge seeking emo moping around Bourne who introduced the sickening trend of shaky cam to movies, I will take Bond.