Meet Your Leaders: Dick Cheney's Admirable Son-in-Law; a Hero

Our Leaders really do want to make the country (or "homeland") safer. Here's one of the men working on it.

The man who married straight daughter Liz Cheney is a sharp conservative lawyer named Philip Perry. Like his wife, who serves as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, Perry has held a series of high-level patronage appointments in the Bush administration. Not long after his father-in-law took office in 2001, President Bush appointed Perry to the third-ranking position in the Justice Department; from there he moved to the top legal position in the Office of Management and Budget and later became general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security, with intermittent stints in the private sector.

But the true scandal of Perry's career in government and law is less about blatant nepotism and more about corporate cronyism.

As the Washington Monthly reveals in its current issue, Perry has spent the past few years at DHS obstructing federal and state regulation of the nation's chemical industry, which still remains vulnerable to a devastating terrorist attack -- and which has paid millions of dollars to Latham & Watkins, the Washington law firm where he has been a partner and lobbyist, earning as much as $700,000 a year. (Having just resigned from Homeland Security last month, Perry could soon return to Latham, thus completing his third circuit through the revolving door.)

The rest of this heart-warming story is here.