Alright- I know what the Chewbacca Defense is, but I have no idea what the ‘Tinkerbell Strategy’ is…
Fill me in, please.
Reader Interactions
29Comments
Comments are closed.
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.
Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?
Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.
This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.
Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.
Bark louder, little dog.
The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.
Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?
Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?
My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.
Consistently wrong since 2002
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
This fight is for everything.
A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires
Peak wingnut was a lie.
Usually wrong but never in doubt
The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.
We still have time to mess this up!
Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!
I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.
Mr.Ortiz
Without reading either of those links, I’m going to say it’s clapping your hands while chanting “I believe!”
Andrew J. Lazarus
Mr. Ortiz is right, but I think particular reference is being made to the claim Tinkerbell is still dead because we didn’t clap loud enough.
texas dem
Yep. It’s the name for the notion that if we all believe and cheer really hard, and hold “pro-troop” rallies and beat up those damn dissenting hippies, that we’ll win the war. And when we don’t, we’ll blame the hippies who wouldn’t clap loud enough.
I have no idea why Yglesias titled that post “the Tinkerbell Strategy;” what he wrote had very little to do with it.
Otto Man
What Andrew said. That Crooked Timber link is a good one.
Essentially, it’s a term of derision that is applied to people who believe that we’ll succeed at something, in spite of all the bad news and depressing facts, if we just cheer hard enough. The flip side is the belief by these same people that any bad news or bad outcome is a result of people not clapping or cheering hard enough.
Tim F
No matter how badly the management has run the war into the ground, we can still win if we clap loudly enough at home.
This is in fact the dominant strategy of the pro-war right. We cannot, nea must no criticize our leaders or else Tinkerbell will die.
tBone
So the debate over Iraq is now being couched in a metaphor involving cartoon characters. Sounds about right to me.
BinkyBoy
its being run by cartoon characters, why not describe it in such terms as well?
I can just see Yosemite Sam, his great mustache bristling, charging through a marketplace, guns blazing, never emptying.
And that waskily wabbit, constantly throwing exploding carrots at him. Ah, the beautiful artistic humor of it.
Tim F
He’s hard to miss, we sent him to represent us at the UN.
speaking of which…
BinkyBoy
thanks Tim, I was wondering if I needed to spell it out :)
BumperStickerist
In point of fact, the Tinkerbell stategy worked.
Though, perhaps, Kos & Ko. have chopped a version of ‘Peter Pan’ such that Tink dies.
Tim F
The magic of Peter Pan was the way that so much of the magic happened in your own head. Keep clapping Bumpist.
BinkyBoy
Its almost like Bumpist is a poor clone of DougJ, one with severe mental defects and a hump.
Off Colfax
Personally, I think of the Tinkerbell Strategy more along the lines of “Just think happy thoughts, and you can fly!” And I’m not that big of a defender of the line anyways.
It’s not snarky enough.
Go with the Pinnochio line instead. “When you wish upon a star…” Has the added benefit of making people’s noses grow uncontrollably, which should give Jon Stewart some good lines.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Bumpersticker, try clicking my previous link. It seems even on stage, clapping doesn’t always cut it.
Shygetz
BinkyBoy Says:
Its almost like Bumpist is a poor clone of DougJ, one with severe mental defects and a hump.
So, it’s almost like Bumpist is an exact replica of DougJ!
BinkyBoy
No no, DougJ has mad skillz. Look how many people fall for his line every day, even after reading his comments for months! He’s brilliant. Bumpist is just a pale shadow of DougJ, a retarded sidekick, if you will.
Tim F
Jeesh, no need for piling-on. I disagree with Bumpist and snark at him liberally but I’d never compare him with DougJ. Assuming that he’s real the Dougster belongs to a class by himself.
Tim F
It comes from the passage late in the play when Tinkerbell drinks poison to keep it away from Peter Pan. The only way to save her is for the audience to show how much they believe in fairies by clapping. Somebody uses a rheostat to ‘wake up’ Tink as the clapping gets louder. Works on many levels.
Profbacon
In point of fact, the Tinkerbell stategy worked.
Um… see ing as there is no tinkerbell. Tinkerbell and the neo-con dream are just that, dreams, flights of fancy, childish hopes that parents indulge. The neo-cons have been indulged too long.
Tinkerbell isn’t dead, the bitch never existed.
Jim Caputo
I guess when shit is flying at you from all sides (including your own people), you’re willing to try anything. Bush has to be shitting in his pants over his poll numbers. The self-proclaimed capital that he thought he’d won last November has faded away like so much fairie dust.
There’s an entertaining article on CapitolHillBlue.com today. If the sources for this article have relayed accurate information, then it’s pretty scary.
Here are a few excerpts…
Geoduck
Anything CapitalHillBlue says should be taken with a shakerfull of salt; they’ve been massively burned by a source at least once.
BumperStickerist
Nothing like being called a retarded sidekick by a self-designated ‘BinkyBoy’ to put teh intertrons all into perspective. Thought having somebody mention that Tinkerbell never actually existed is a bonus – sort of calls the Left’s use of that non-reality-based icon into question, so
…. anyway, I’d like to propose a counter-meme to the ‘TinkerBell Strategy’, one that describes the approach favored by the Democrats and their fellow travellers.
Call theirs “The Tonto Gambit” or the ‘What’s This We, White Man?’ (WTW,WM?) Strategy.
John S.
Bumpist-
You live up to your name.
Your comments aren’t intelligent enough to be taken seriously in this forum, but are pithy enough to inhabit a $1 bumper sticker on the back window of a car.
Keep up the good work.
Bob
The post is about the liberal hawks, and how they’re kind of out of touch. Shinseki said we needed a half-million troops to win the peace in Iraq. Otherwise, chaos and civil war. You know, like we have.
The problem is that there aren’t a half-million US combat troops. That’s where the unreality comes in. In order to put 500,000 soldiers into Iraq the US would have had to convince its allies to join in this foolhardiness or would have had to created a draft. That’s where the Tinkerbelle comes in. Neither of these things were going to happen, so instead of supporting an alternative way to have waged a war that wasn’t going to happen, and still isn’t going to happen, the liberal hawks who wish to rejoin the reality-based community would do better to just say that the US did not have sufficient combat forces to occupy a country that big.
Better to stick with the Grenadas if we want to occupy a country.
Of course, that would be an admission of the limitations of our military might. We can bomb the shit out of you, but once you crawl out of your rubble we can’t occupy you, you stubborn world, you.
John S.
Damn that’s funny Bob.
The liberal hawks are out of touch? Maybe.
But the conservative hawks are definitely out of touch. A British general over 100 years ago theorized that for every 100 civilians you need 1 soldier to control an area, and that formula holds true even today.
Out of touch is knowing you need more troops than you have, and sending what you’ve got in anyway – consequences be damned.
While we’re at it, let’s have a land war in Asia or attack Russia in the middle of Winter. We know we can’t win either of those scenarios either, but we have to prove we’ve got the balls to do it, right?
BinkyBoy
I’m still clapping. My hands are bleeding.
When will I forget how right the liberals have been about iraq?
jobiuspublius
Zee Tinker Bell Strategy, is the heart and soul of the snake oil industry. You think heroine sales are a big part of the world economy? You don’t want to know about snake oil. Oi!
Andrew J. Lazarus
You think heroine sales are a big part of the world economy?
I’d like to buy a heroine. Send details quick.
goonie bird
Of course fairies exist who else cuases trouble for the liberal weenies?