Let’s go fly fishing with Mr. Nice Guy

In the spirit of Monty Python, it’s time for something totally different. As a break from politics, let’s go fishing on the Snake River in Wyoming. With Dick Cheney. Now wait a minute, really this is not about politics, even though Vice President Cheney has the rare distinction of being hated even worse than President Bush by the loony left, the mainstream media and the Democrats (same, same).

It seems that the much-maligned Cheney, variously referred to by his critics as BeelzeDick, Darth Vader and other less flattering names, can be Mr. Nice Guy when he leaves the political battlefields and goes home to Wyoming for his favorite pastime, fly fishing.

That’s what Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard reports after going fly fishing with Cheney on the South Fork of the Snake River, in a cover story titled The Passion of Dick Cheney.

Jackson, Wyoming
At the risk of being publicly ridiculed, quarantined, or stoned, I'll just say it straightaway: I really like Dick Cheney. Don't get me wrong, I feel sick about it… But Cheney is also known as a fisherman, and I am a fishing slut with little or no moral center.

Labash writes that a year ago, he first met Cheney at a book party in Washington and had a long, serious chat about fly fishing. But his requests to actually go on a fishing trip with the man the Secret Service calls “The Angler” were denied until a year later, when he unexpectedly got an invitation to come to Wyoming. He brought along his tape recorder to make it a working trip, but admits he didn’t expect to get much talk out of the reportedly close-lipped VP. But Cheney surprised him as soon as they got in the boat by saying:

"You know the only reason I agreed to this? I wanted to see what kind of reporter had the cojones to convince his editors to pay for him to come fish the South Fork."

Our guide, Pat Kelly, shoves us off into the chop, and despite all the forewarnings of sacrosanct Cheney silence on the river, he keeps up a steady patter over the next eight hours. He inquires about my kids and asks Kelly about his offseason employment. He tells me what he likes to read (Fly Fisherman, Gray's Sporting Journal, the Economist, raw intelligence), as well as what he doesn't (the blogs). "I don't blog," he says, as if clearing up a misconception. In April, though, the blogosphere was obsessed over a photo of Cheney fishing on the Snake. Many held that a reflection in Cheney's sunglasses revealed not a hand casting a flyrod, but a naked woman. When I ask Cheney about it, he breaks into a trouble-making grin. "I had a great guide that day."

If you were expecting Cheney to reveal the truth about the famous “naked woman” story, sorry, that’s all you get on that. But Labash’s report on the fishing trip may well be the most revealing interview ever done on Cheney. Even if you don’t fish, it’s well worth the reading time. And if you don’t mind me spoiling the ending, the score on the day of catching and releasing was Cheney 20, Labash 2.

Cheney takes his fly fishing just as seriously as his politics. When he’s gone, we may well miss his adult supervision in Washington.