Talk:Mayberry Machiavelli

Problem tags/possible deletion

I don't really have the time, or actually much of an interest, in reforming this article. However, I think that calls for the deletion of this article are wrong-headed. In fact, there's a lot of material readily available on the term, and the article should definitely stay and be expanded. The term was being used as late as the 2008 campaign, when Mother Jones was calling John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin, "The Return of the Mayberry Machiavellis". The term was also floated in regards to the 2007 US Attorney purge by The Huffington Post. It has even been used to apply to non-Federal politicians, as when a Chula Vista mayor stopped discussion about the firing of a port commissioner. Talking Points Memo has frequently used the term since 2002. [1][2][3] The Washington Monthly has also used the term with vigor.[4] It even has some cache in the entertainment press, as when it was applied to a discussion of Friday Night Lights.

And all that barely scratches the surface. There's absolutely no need to delete this article just because it's now in the Wiktionary. Instead, this article just requires someone with a real interest in the subject to expand it. The article's practically begging to be written. The editor who removed the following

The phrase, seeming felicitously apt, was picked up and repeated by many critics of the George W. Bush presidency.

and then left the edit summary of "There were lots of controversies but this item is quite minor in comparison", has obviously never performed a Google search on the term. That's an absolutely verifiable statement — save, perhaps, for the somewhat non-neutral phrase "seeming felicitously apt". The phrase was indeed picked up and repeated by many critics of the GWB presidency. There are about 25,000 hits for the term.

Sure, an argument could be made, I suppose, that the many, ready appearances of the term are still just repetitions of the basic denotational sense of the phrase. But we have an article on balkanization, which can be equally defined succinctly by Wiktionary. Does the fact that something is in Wiktionary really mean that it must only be in Wiktionary? If so, I rather think we'd have to scrap thousands of articles on Wikipedia. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 04:07, 12 June 2009 (UTC)