ANDREW SULLIVAN asks:

If Liz Cheney were not her father's daughter, why would she be on the Sunday talk shows? Why is she added to ABC news' roster? What experience does she have in journalism or government?

Elizabeth Cheney actually has substantial experience in government. She worked in the State Department for several years after college. After law school in the mid-90s she worked for the World Bank's International Finance Corporation and as a USAID officer at a few embassies. The crucial moment, though, was in 2002, when she was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for near-eastern affairs. At the time of the appointment, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote a piece on the pattern of nepotistic appointments in the Bush Administration, and Paul Krugman used Ms Cheney as evidence of a broad-based return of nepotism in American society. Ms Cheney later served as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for near-eastern affairs. (Her portfolio involved promoting democracy and civil society, and promoting America's image; the Bush Administration conceived of these two tasks as identical, which explains in large measure why it did such a lousy job of both.)

The problem with Ms Cheney is not inexperience, but family connections. Her appointment to powerful State Department positions, like her husband Philip Perry's appointment as general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, was part of a self-reinforcing habit of nepotism and insularity that plagued George W Bush's administration. Mr Cheney famously appointed supremely loyal associates throughout the government, allowing him to exercise influence through vertical channels in the State Department, Defence Department, Department of Justice and elsewhere, and ensuring him a degree of power never before seen in a vice president. But his reliance on such loyal associates ultimately trapped him inside an echo chamber of bad advice on issues such as torture and military intervention abroad. The reason why you shouldn't appoint your daughter as your surrogate inside the State Department isn't necessarily that she lacks the relevant experience. It is that your daughter is very likely to give you an inflated sense of your own genius, and that relying for strategic advice on a familial clique is likely to drive you into a blind corner of actions that only look defensible to people who are related to you.