Link.President Barack Obama's spokesman is defending the administration's ethical standards.
Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday, "The bar that we set is the highest that any administration in the country has ever set."
During a briefing filled with questions about Tom Daschle's decision to withdraw from consideration to be Health and Human Services secretary, Gibbs pointed to experts who describe the administration's ethics rules as the strongest in history.
And he reportedly said this with a straight face. Cabinet appointees in previous administrations were forced to step aside when it was revealed they hadn't paid Social Security taxes on their kids' nannies, or they had a housemaid who was an illegal alien.
Now the administration with the highest ethical bar in history has a tax cheat running the IRS, an attorney general who recommended presidential pardons for convicted terrorists and a fugitive tax cheat, and a secretary of state whose husband has received millions from foreign governments.