Aging & Wisdom Quote by Pat Oliphant

Nixon as a "good dragon" is the kind of line only a political cartoonist would write: a fairy-tale metaphor sharpened into an indictment of both power and the people who feed on it. Pat Oliphant isn’t praising Richard Nixon; he’s mourning the disappearance of a certain caliber of villain - one with narrative weight, one whose corruption was legible enough to be fought, drawn, and, crucially, brought down.

The "old days" aren’t nostalgia for cleaner politics. They’re nostalgia for clearer stakes. Dragons are public threats: visible, feared, undeniable. Watergate turned Nixon into a creature big enough to organize a civic storyline around - investigative journalism as sword, congressional hearings as torchlight, the rule of law as the village that might actually hold. Calling him "good" is the cynical twist: good not morally, but dramatically. Nixon was a single, towering symbol of executive abuse, giving opposition a coherent target and giving democracy a stress test it could pass.

Oliphant’s subtext is that contemporary politics (whenever he’s gesturing from) feels less like dragon-slaying and more like whack-a-mole: diffuse scandals, fragmented media, incentives that reward permanent outrage over decisive accountability. A "good dragon" concentrates attention; a swarm of lesser monsters just exhausts the villagers. The line flatters our self-image as heroic dragon-slayers while quietly asking whether we still have the tools - or the appetite - to win a fight that ends with the dragon actually dead.