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The Obama administration has waived its ethics rules to allow William Lynn to serve as the deputy secretary of Defense.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said he supports Lynn's nomination and looks “forward to prompt consideration by the Senate.”
http://ad.thehill.com/adlog.php?bannerid=1383&clientid=1260&zoneid=33&so urce=&block=0&capping=0&cb=20bdfc3022d80b65bce760f 18b4577fd (broken link)
However, Levin cautioned that his panel will insist and ensure that Lynn, a Raytheon executive and former lobbyist, will comply with a strict set of ethics rules. He said this would include a requirement to recuse himself for a year from any decisions involving Raytheon, a large defense contractor.
"The decision of the Administration to impose an additional set of requirements...does not change the standards to which we hold all nominees," Levin said.
By the way, I would prefer that the lobbying rules be upheld completely, but at least they were not completely abandoned in this case.
Obama has a tendency to go overboard, and he will quickly learn that it will be in his interest to be a little more flexible when setting rules. Especially since people aren't used to knowing every little details that he is providing to run the administration with transparency. Most find the CHANGE disturbing because they are used to: "What happened in the White House, Stays in the White House".
In Obama's defense, something being missed is that the exception was made on request by Robert Gates.
I think Obama is finding out how quickly those who voted for him will find out he made promises he can't keep. He probably didn't expect it would happen so soon and with so many of his nominees.
The question is - did he knowingly make promises he couldn't keep just to get elected, or is he so incompetent and inexperienced that he actually thought he could keep those promises?
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