31. is where a fishing award can create a political uproar

Dick Cheney loves fly fishing, but according to his detractors he hates the rivers and streams in which they swim and did everything he could to destroy them. So when the American Museum of Fly Fishing in tony Manchester, Vermont (my home town) decided to honor the former Vice-President in 2009 for his fishing prowess, the residents of the Green Mountain State went bonkers. If the former Vice President even dared to visit the Manchester museum, throngs of opponents would have descended from the hills with the intent of trying to indict him for war crimes. (A few months earlier two towns on the other side of the state passed symbolic motions to do just that.)

Ted Williams—the fisherman not the old-time baseball player—who was the conservation editor for Fly Rod and Reel magazine was quoted in the New York Daily News as saying: “It’s as if the Holocaust Museum held a dinner to honor [Nazi war criminal] Klaus Barbie.” http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/dick-cheney-invite-american-museum-fly-fishing-sparks-anger-article-1.370871

In honor of the award, someone created the picture below with the tagline: "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to my underground lair." It can be found at: http://moldychum.squarespace.com/home-old/tag/dick-cheney

Officials at the fly fishing museum were obviously caught off guard. They initially refused to comment on the award even though a Cheney aide acknowledged receipt of the invitation.

Then, according to an article in the local hometown paper, they noted that the museum is not a political organization. It has fly fishing equipment used by Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, each of which faced political opponents in their own.

But the museums actions were “ham-handed” at best. As Steve Wright, the former Vermont Fish and Wildlife commissioner, noted: "The heritage the museum advances and tries to promote exists because of healthy aquatic resources and Vice President Cheney throughout his eight years as Vice President advanced policies that were damaging to those resources."

http://www.manchesterjournal.com/stories/cheney-invite-creates-stir,14778

Comments about the invitation were almost uniformly negative, of the ilk “The AMFF (the museum) is dead to me,” which is tough news for an organization that depends on membership dollars.

Rumor had it that Cheney would be honored at an annual dinner at the New York City’s “Angler’s Club” in March 2009, not at the museum itself. The rumor was wrong. It turns out Cheney would instead speak at a Washington D.C. fundraiser in November 2009. That event happened. And, according to an article in the Manchester museum’s journal American Fly Fisher (Winter 2010 p. 22) entitled “A Capital Evening” Dick Cheney gave a speech at the Grand Hyatt in which he thanked the museum for inviting him and gave it one of his rods (as well as the shaft.)