The press's warped priorities

It cares more about Mary Cheney's gayness than it does about the
dangerous actions of Dick Cheney's son-in-law, Philip Perry.

By Joe Conason


Feb. 16, 2007 | Did you hear that Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter is
having a baby? Of course you did -- and so did everyone else -- because
over the past two months, the controversial pregnancy of Mary Cheney has
been noted and debated on every almost every significant news outlet in
America.

When Wolf Blitzer opened up that touchy topic during an interview on
CNN, the vice president responded with his trademark snarl. Mary Cheney
seems to resent questions about her personal life, too, except when she
is promoting her book or marketing Coors beer.

Embarrassing as the contradictions between his gay daughter and his
homophobic party may be, however, the vice president should be grateful
that the mainstream media hasn't turned the spotlight on his son-in-law.

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.)

Perry's crowning achievement in the months before he quit the federal
government is a set of laws and regulations that permit chemical
manufacturers to decide whether and how to improve the notoriously lax
security at their plants. Last fall, with Perry overseeing the
legislative process, Congress passed a feeble bill that was supposed to
force reform before a disaster occurs. The hardworking Perry made sure
that the bill was rendered even more toothless when he and his staff set
up the regulations to enforce it. Those rules include a special
provision designed to frustrate vulnerable states such as New Jersey
from passing stronger regulations, which will be preempted by the weak
federal law.

In an interview with the Washington Monthly, Sen. Frank Lautenberg,
D-N.J., furiously excoriated the Bush administration for coddling its
corporate friends. "In order to please their cronies in the chemical
industry, the Bush administration is willing to put the health and
safety of millions of people at risk," he said of Perry's handiwork.

Or as Art Levine himself put it in his article: "A flippant critic might
say the father-in-law has been prosecuting a war that creates more
terrorists abroad, while the son-in-law has been working to ensure
they'll have easy targets at home. But it's more precise to say that
White House officials really, really don't want to alienate the chemical
industry, and Perry has been really, really willing to help them not do it."

Meanwhile, as Perry was preparing to leave his sinecure and return to
the private sector, he came under severe criticism from within the
government as well. On Feb. 13, Comptroller General David Walker, one of
the more independent-minded officials in the capital, reported to
Congress that Perry had purposely frustrated every effort by the
Government Accountability Office to monitor the Department of Homeland
Security -- which is widely regarded as a wasteful, ineffective,
lobbyist-infested disaster.

Does that strike you as an important story? Obviously the security of
the chemical industry is a matter of critical importance, perhaps even
more urgent than a lesbian pregnancy in the Cheney family. (I should
admit that I may be biased on the subject, because the Nation Institute
Investigative Fund, which I recently joined as director, helped to
finance Levine's research last year.)

Someday the potential damage done to national security by Philip Perry
may cost us very dearly, as another penetrating article in the
Washington Monthly by terror expert Stephen Flynn explains in grave
detail. Hundreds of chemical facilities across the country are
inadequately protected, which Levine proved when he casually infiltrated
one of them, and the most dangerous could kill tens of thousands of
people if blown up by terrorists.

Yet so far the mainstream media has more or less ignored this story of
public peril and corporate influence, despite the added frisson of the
Cheney connection. Lesbian baby gossip is so much juicier, so much
easier to report, so much simpler to sensationalize -- and so much more
fascinating for the Washington press corps, whose priorities are as
warped and trivial as the tabloid culture they now emulate.

From Salon.com. See also:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea...3.levine1.html
for a description of how well this new law is working...