The Passion of Dick Cheney

The Weekly Standard: Fishing The Snake River With The Vice President

(Weekly Standard) 
As we break for a fried-chicken boxed lunch on a gravel bar, I start feeling desperate and am thinking about turning to my big gun: the Pistol Pete, a woolly bugger-like fly that effectively mimics baitfish, but that has a little extra action with a propeller on front. I picked a brownie up near this spot on it the day before. I ask Cheney what he thinks and if he'd ever fish it. "If I had fished every other fly in my box, and none of them worked, then maybe," he says, as though I was defiling his water by chucking the equivalent of bubba bait.

Shamed, I still break out of Kelly's recommendation cycle, and pick a green Thompson's Hopper of my own, all foam and hackle and rubber legs. I immediately take a cutthroat out of a riffle as Cheney is still finishing his lunch. "I'm back," I say to nobody in particular, as if I'd been there before.

But I wasn't back. Cheney goes back to catching fish, I go back to getting skunked. While Cheney is not a braggart in the least, he is a proud fisherman, and so he appreciates the White House photographer, David Bohrer, following behind in a trailer boat, taking snaps of his catches before he cuts them loose. "Where's David?" he says after one cutthroat. "He's bored, he's off taking pictures of flowers," offers Kelly. "You can tell he's a short-timer," shrugs Cheney.


I step into the White House photographer role when Bohrer isn't present with my CVS disposable camera ("Let Matt get a picture of this," Cheney takes to telling Kelly) and start a loud patter of bellyaching about my bad turn of luck (refraining from the usual string of expletives, out of deference to Cheney's office). "You've got the same hoppers on that he does," Kelly offers, perhaps still stung that I briefly went outside his advised patterns or still ruffled that I almost blinded him in one eye. But I am beginning to see how it works: Cheney doesn't need to talk trash. He has people to do that for him.

Not that he doesn't talk any smack. At one point, when Kelly is netting one of Cheney's fish and about to cut it loose, Cheney says, "Wait a minute, do you want to let Matt get a look at that so he can see what he's missing?"

The fish deficit is starting to grow ridiculous.

I have time to think of all the reasons Cheney is outcatching me. For one, my drifts are getting screwed up by the oar and Cheney casting at too high an angle into my water, forcing my flies to drag more often than they should. For another, the guide seems to be setting him up on all the fish when the boat holds position. Then there is the front-of-the-boat problem. If it doesn't matter where you sit, why does he always take the front? When I mention this to Scarlett, he welcomes me to the back-of-the-boat club. Cheney's friends let him have the front of the boat since he's the vice president of the United States. "But he's got about four months left," says Scarlett. "Then he can do time in the back like everybody else."

But there is another reason, of course, that Cheney is outfishing me. It's probably the more important reason: He's a lot better fisherman. He is a fierce caster. He has pinpoint precision with his fly, throwing sliders under branches, lopping flies over tree limbs, dropping his hopper just off the bank's edge, making it look extra susceptible to a trout mugging, like a drunk falling off a curb.

As Kelly rows us alongside a steep rockface, with tiny crevices at the bottom where the current swirls by and fish are likely holding, Cheney perfectly sidearms a cast right into the pocket. His fly is inhaled by a greedy rainbow. It's like watching a mailman throw a letter through a door slot from 30 feet away. Even Kelly, who is no purveyor of flattery, says, "Now that was a cast."

We hit the end of our 12-mile float and exit the boat onto the ramp. Cheney does not count his fish, though I do, obsessively (I've caught 869 so far this year, back when I used to catch fish). I tell him what the damage is:

Dick Cheney: 20.

Me: 2.

He doesn't give me that stingy, trademark lopsided grin that looks like a broken egg sliding off a rock. His is the full-on smile of an ebullient child. He shows back-molars and dental work, everything. In several decades of watching him, I've never seen him smile this big.

I ask him how much I should tip the guide, but he's already laid one hundred bucks or so on him. "It's all right, I got him," he says. I try to get the vice president back, but he won't have it. "It's okay, I can afford it," he says. Plus, he adds, "It's a small price to pay for bragging rights." We bid each other adieu. He's off home and says that he has some pressing business there: He has to email my friends that he beat me 20 to 2.

The next day, I have lunch with Jack Dennis, a longtime friend and fishing guide of Cheney's. ("Don't believe anything he tells you," Cheney offered, when finding out where I was headed.) Dennis is a bit of a local legend. He has introduced fly-fishing to everyone from Harrison Ford to Arnold Palmer. He authors books, hosts fly-fishing shows, and lectures on the sport worldwide.

Some speculate that the reason Cheney gets along so famously with Dennis is that Dennis does all the talking. Cheney doesn't have to fill in any spaces. And though Dennis is indeed a verbal firehose of stories, recollections, and trivia, he also has a melancholic streak. His office in Jackson, which is adorned with everything from letters of thanks from baseball legend Ted Williams--who was impressed by his fly-tying--to landing nets with presidential seals, has a placard on his shelf inscribed with the words of Henry David Thoreau: "Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after."

Dennis has fished with Cheney often over the years and has seen him at some peculiar times. There was the day not long before September 11, when Dennis was rowing Cheney and his daughter Liz, and a passenger jet flew close overhead on the way to the airport. Liz, says Dennis, asked her father if he was ever worried about a plane like that coming to hit him. "He looked at her and said, 'Why would they want to do that? All those people on that plane wanna live."

Dennis, who is a committed environmentalist, says Cheney has gotten a bad rap as a despoiler of the land, since he has often quietly worked behind the scenes, doing things like torpedoing prospective mines in Wyoming that would pollute treasured cutthroat fisheries. Once, when fishing, Dennis says, Cheney asked him, "How do you think fly-fishermen view me?" Dennis replied: " 'I don't think they view you very well, as a lot of people don't. It's not because of your fishing ability or anything, I think it's just because of the mood of the country.' He said, 'Well, I understand that.' I said, 'If they all went fishing with you, that would be a different story.' "

Perhaps the strangest moment for Dennis, however, was one afternoon on the river, just days after Cheney had a heart defibrillator implanted. Dennis says Cheney was reclining in the boat with "his head leaned back--he'd never done anything like that. I went back to look and see if he was breathing." Cheney popped open one eye and asked, "What are you doing?"

"I'm checking to see if you're breathing," Dennis said.

"Well so what?" Cheney snapped back. "What would happen if I wasn't? Will you just not worry about me? Leave me alone and whatever happens happens. I can't think of a better place to die than right here."

I wrap up with Dennis and realize I have a few hours left of daylight, so I ask him where I should fish. He grabs my notebook and draws a map to an unmarked creek in Grand Teton National Park. I ask him what flies I should bring. "Just go," he says. "You're losing time."

The directions are confusing, and I get lost several times. Even the park rangers don't know where Dennis's spot is. But I finally find it, after my car nearly plows into a black bear loafing off into the woods. After driving six miles down a dirt path and descending on foot down a steep embankment, which nearly causes a rockslide, I find a huge, slow eddying pool that feeds a faster creek, which itself feeds into the Snake about a half a mile away. Sneaking up in the tall grass along the banks, I see a large cutthroat holding in the lazy current. But my first cast spooks him, as his shadow shoots downstream. I jump into the pool and wade down slowly, firing a 50-foot cast to drift a hopper past some downed limbs near the pool's tailout. A cutthroat explodes on it, and moments later I am holding this gleaming, brilliant, orange-hued fish in my hand, as the setting sun crowns the Tetons above me.

The fish has to be a 19-incher, though since I'm the only witness, I'm going to call it 20. It's the biggest trout I take during my trip by far, and it's enough of a fish to wipe yesterday's humiliation off the books. As I place the cutthroat back in the cool water, watching it dart away as it realizes it's regained its freedom, I'm reminded of all the Cheney haters, who hope to God that when his stint ends in four months he permanently hangs out his "Gone Fishing" sign. I'm not sure Cheney and his critics won't finally find some agreement.

There are worse things to wish on a man.

[skysoldier75]

*** Cheney deserves exactly the same kind of "going away party" when he leaves office that Benito Mussolini got when he left office.

Cheney represents all that''s wrong and corrupt and bad about America.

[im4honesty]

So Satan likes to fish! He must like torturing the worm, then torturing the fish. Much more fun than simply shooting them in the face, double your pleasure.

[messiahx4eve]

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAWWWWWWWWWWWWW, we can call him PRICK cheney and not get censored!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Hmmm how bout dicktheprick cheney? That kind of fits him all around as a human ******.

[messiahx4eve]

Can we say prick cheney and not get censored?

[wakeup60]

Does anyone remember the character "Reagan" in the movie "The Exorcist"? There is one scene when the Eldery Priest was preceding with the Exorcisim-alone and Reagan got free of her bounds and made the Priest have a fatal heart attack...then the younger Priest burst into the bedroom and found the priest on the floor with Reagan smurking and gutterly laughing/Reminds me of "President" Cheney and his non-feeling persona-No wonder he and Rove are best buds/where in the hell did they find the person that wrote THIS piece of trash? But, then again Garbage begets garbage begets garbage!! In just about 4 more months and we won''t have to look at these faces any longer or be subjected to the disgusting ways they have treated Americans! Get our kids home from this senseless WAR! And let all the "BUSH BUDDIES" get on with spending all the $$$$$ they have made by killing and maiming our soldiers/enjoy every penny of that blood/oil money guys...KARMA is GREAT! Obama ''08 !!!

[ubrew12]

Cheney: "I''m so passionate about bailing out my banker buddies from their latest bubble. Thats free market capitalism at its finest!"

[sleepyric]

Cheney,,passion??? I wish only the worst for this miserable piece of human waste, and his mousy little slimy wife also..I hope he either drowns while fishing, or a bear eats him and $hits him out...piece of ***. Criminal. Now the republicans want to vote into office an equally stupid, crooked team of pukes..

[rinnie5]

liberalme,
The democrat war is afganistan.
What''''s the difference?
Is that NOT within striking distance of Iran.
Iran is the ral target baby!
We should smoke them

So....get YOUR submachine guns out of your precious gun collection and go smoke em!! Oh............I see......you would rather send some teenagers to go and fight for you. You are disgusting in your rhetoric!!!

[rinnie5]

Notice how Obama "slapped" his wife back in "her" place.
He''''s is the Boss.
She has been out of media.
Vote Obama if you want a Racist, Socialist, Communist

Your stupidity is astounding!! Michelle stays home with her children. So when she does go out and trys to help occasionally, Obama gets blamed for that?? Gaaaaag@repub slimers. How much is Palin the good mother of 5 staying with her kids? Super mom my arse. Not many moms can afford nannys, cooks etc. And don''t say the Dad is tending them...he is in every event with her........gaping and grinning like the true stoodge he is.

[rushlimpdrug]

"Fishing The Snake River With The Vice President"


Should read:

"Fishing The Snake River With A Snake"

[godseyesore-2009]

Cheney=Passion? HaHaHa. Maybe true if you define passion as also equal to criminal dementia.

[joker1944-2009]

Joseph Stalin, to this day, has a very high approval rating in Russia.

''One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.''
~ William Shakespeare

[skyk239]

Some said Hitler was a Nice Guy when you got to know him too. Most of them died soon afterward but some said it.

[bluestardad]

A COWARD THAT SENDS OTHERS TO WAR BUT REFUSES TO SERVE HIMSELF!

NO FISHING IN JAIL AFTER THE WAR CRIMES TRIALS!

[messiahx4eve]

Can we call him C*O*C*K cheney? How about P*E*N*I*S cheney? How about STUBB cheney? How''s about MR. HAPPY cheney, Meat puppet, or LIL'' D*I*C*K?

[messiahx4eve]

Can we call him *** cheney?

[sparks224]

How evil is D.ick Cheney?

Look at the damage he%u2019s done to the world.

[sparks224]

Our Father who art in heavin....
....and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from D.ick Cheney, amen.

[notfooled]

The title of this story should read "The Poison of *** Cheney."

I haven''t read this story but I don''t have to in order to know that Cheney is a bloodthirtsty, murdering war profitereer with the blood of almost a million humans on his hands.

I''m counting the days till he''s out of office and thus fair game for war crime trials for genocide around the world. He won''t be able to find a hole deep enough to hide in.

Posted by notfooled at 03:27 PM : Sep 18, 2008

[irreverent1-2009]

I think *** Cheney and Bobby Knight were born of the same mother. The world will be better off when they are both gone.