Deletion of Mistakes were made

Comment: a perfectly good stand-alone article, |well-referenced, for a cliched phrase.  Not exactly the same as a "non-apology apology", and I see no pursuasive argument to delete or to merge it, so neither redirect or merger would improve the encyclopedia.  The nomination is of the  variety
Stance: keep
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Reliable sources (WP:RS||WP:IDONTLIKEIT)

Comment: No valid deletion argument has yet been articulated, certainly not by the nominator who claims this topic is "already covered" in non-apology apology when that is patently not the case (search on the word "mistakes" in that article to see what I mean). Fences and windows provides good examples of usage, but those examples do not "equate" the phrase "mistakes were made" with "non-apology apology," rather the former is a prominent example of the latter per the sources cited. The http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/02/AR2005070200060.html last source cited by Fences, the Washington Post, argues that employing "mistakes were made" rhetorically "has been a favorite technique of American presidents." That's an interesting (and |notable!) detail worth adding to the article, particularly because it supports material already there&mdash;it's certainly not a reason for merging content that is already sourced well enough (via the ''New York Times'' and Bill Safire, separately from the Times) to have its own article.  I'm only !voting here because I came looking for our article on this famous phrase in U.S. politics and was hoping for some good examples, which were indeed there. Unfortunately it had been prodded (which I removed) and now we are at AfD. Of course this article could be better, but deleting or even stripping content for a merge would be silly and no one has really offered a persuasive argument for doing so, meaning  is still operative
Stance: keep
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Notability (WP:N||WP:PRESERVE)

Comment: per Fences and windows. (and I agree that AfD is not a good place to propose |merges
Stance: merge
Cited policy: Wikipedia:Merging (WP:MERGE)