I originally posted this elsewhere, but Mennonite Marc thought it was pretty good, and I respect that, so I’ll repost it. It’s entirely political, but political philosophy rather than anything more specific. It’s pithy, and it’s much more than two weeks late:

“People are going to have a drink and have a smoke and that’s kind of the way life is going to be.” -Stephen Harper

Harper’s quote, however banal (he was asked some question about tobacco use in Canada) sums up one of the nicer points of better conservative political thought (and, I hope, better liberal political thought, though I search for examples with my lamp…): not everything in life is political, and not everything in life admits to a political solution, and a political solution should not be sought for everything in life.

“Political correctness,” the old school version, was an attempt in part to make everything political. There was a politically correct view on which movies were good and bad, there was a politically correct view on which beverage was good or bad, and there was even a politically correct view on which car you should drive (think Volvo ownership as correlated to to political predilictions. That poor car…). Think of all this as Josef Stalin’s contribution to the political discourse.

Conservatives and other right-wingers have been known to fall into this mental pit, but hopefully less often than not.