Protesting Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney | BCBusiness

Protesting visiting “authors” like Dick Cheney just enhances their profile – and book sales.

I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to protest a speech by former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney.

But that’s what a couple of hundred people did last night outside The Vancouver Club. They even became vigorous about it, blocking the entrance, chanting, booing, and generally causing a noisy scene of the type that was very common a few years ago here in supposed Lotus Land.

But then, I also can’t for the life of me understand why people would pay $500 each to listen to Cheney, either. He’s just regurgitating what’s in his greatly overwritten book of “memoirs.”

(From all accounts, the book is a ghostwriter’s dream – turn on the recorder and let the man himself drone on and on about his own greatness. As a ghostwriter, I should have such a highly paid and relatively easy gig!)

Throughout his career, Cheney has always been a political thug, and his job as vice president to George Bush simply allowed him to do it on a much larger scale in Iran and Afghanistan. I guess there is an element of the U.S. Republican Party that believes in his brand of frontier sheriffing and so accounts for the issuing of this book.

But why anyone in Canada would want to listen to such a blowhard is beyond me.

However, he is a high profile example of the new world of publishing – the more controversial you are, the more publishers desperate for sales will throw money at you.  

So, although it was obvious that the protest was engineered by an NDP that is trying to make a name for itself in Ottawa, it was futile and wrong-headed.

Their hard-core supporters applauded, I’m sure, but all that ink just helped Cheney and his publishers make more money. The ex-VP probably pockets something like $100,000 for the gig, plus increases his book royalties. Which, I’m sure, will increase now that the book has received even more undeserved publicity.

All that a protest by the “little people” does is pump up the ex-VP’s multi-million dollar pension.