Notes from the Cheney protest (with photos) UPDATED with shaky video

Spent a little over an hour at the protest. Here are some quick observations:

Stunned at how few cops there were - maybe a dozen or so uniformed police standing in front of the door. Stunned because they did very little to protect the arriving guests, who were surrounded by the crowd  challenging the attendees. In fact, the staff in the Vancouver Club had to keep coming out to guide the poor folk through the crowd into the building to great booing.

The expression on the faces of these guests was illuminating. Varying from smug smiles, to fearful stares at the ground to unbridled anger mixed with fear. Mostly smug. Some amused. These are very rich people whose lives have been built on stepping on people.

There were probably a couple hundred protesters and about as many media. Well-behaved but noisy.

Sickened by the sight of so many older, florid, overweight, coiffed men attending the event with young blonde women in tow. I'd say these couples comprised about half the guests that I saw. Perhaps these young women were daughters, secretaries or press agents. Perhaps.

No violence was had, although one middle-aged woman guest with a 50's perm that could cut glass got her purse caught in a camera as she wormed through the crowd. She yanked the purse with a violence that could only come from fear. She took a wayward swing at the poor camera guy. That was all I saw.

Brian Lilley was broadcasting across the street. I thought no one recognized him (and perhaps they didn't) but he got one of the biggest boos of the evening as he went through the crowd into the door.

(Strange, despite the adrenaline rush of the crowd and my dislike for Cheney and the people who paid such big bucks to hobnob with the war criminal, my true animosity really boiled over when confronted with Lilley. I guess because Cheney is history and hidden behind doors he's not real but here's a guy with an affected pompadour standing on the curb who is trying to destroy CBC so his type of news will dominate the airwaves, just like his patrons have done with newspapers and the government. Lilley at that moment was the essence of all that is wrong with Canada and our media. He simply repelled me.)

An aging blonde Playboy type model came out at one point to rescue some attendees caught in the crowd. It might have been hostess Leah Costello but I can't be sure. But the point to me is that this woman represented everything about the evening. She was the embodiment of the superficiality and impotent entitlement of all the people who entered the building tonight, not to mention the guest of honour.

(It's times like this when I wish I could write like Hunter S. Thompson. He would have had a field day, not so much with the motley crew of protesters but with the expensive suit lizard kings who we watched get swallowed into the belly of the beast of the Vancouver Club*.)

* I'll be posting more about the Vancouver Club, of which I learned this afternoon has quite a history of accusations agin' it of harboring a pedophile ring. Doesn't surprise me one bit.

UPDATE: This is classic lack of self awareness:

You can't get better than that. Comedy gold.