He went on to list this new set of policies that will go into effect immediately and cover all official White House events:

• White House staff will be stationed physically at the check points with the United States Secret Service.
• Guests will be checked off of the list by White House staff and the Secret Service will continue to ensure that all guests have been properly cleared before entering the White House.
• Guests whose names are not on the guest list will be assisted by White House staff present at the check point for appropriate resolution.
• As always, the Secret Service will provide security and remain ultimately responsible for controlling access to the White House complex.

A White House spokesman has not responded to an e-mail Salon sent seeking comment on Rumsfeld's statement and information about Obama's assertion, but Press Secretary Robert Gibbs did address the issue at his daily press briefing. His response, which was light on specifics and heavy on snark, did suggest that Rumsfeld may technically be right.

"I will let Secretary Rumsfeld explain to you and to others whether he thinks that the effort in Afghanistan was sufficiently resourced during his tenure as secretary of defense," Gibbs said in response to a question from ABC News' Jake Tapper. Pressed further, he took a shot at Rumsfeld, saying, "I'll let him explain to the American public whether he believes that the effort in Afghanistan during 2001 to 2006 was appropriately resourced. You know, you go to war with the secretary of defense you have, Jake."

Still, it seems Rumsfeld and Obama might both be right, principally because the former defense secretary's statement only covered the years 2001 to 2006, when he left the Bush administration. Gibbs said Obama was referring to requests made in 2008, and there is evidence those occurred.

There's one other possibility here, ironically and inadvertently suggested by the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb. He cited an October piece from the Standard by Steve Hayes in which an anonymous defense official is quoted as saying, "There was no request on anyone's desk for eight months. There was not a request that went to the White House because we didn't have forces to commit. So on the facts, they're wrong."

Now, that refers to 2008. But it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility  that other generals in Afghanistan found themselves in a similar position in the years after the invasion of Iraq, knowing they needed reinforcements but also that there were none, and so they simply never submitted formal requests.

Now, though, after the president announced his decision to send an additional 30,00 troops to fight in Afghanistan, Hayden's had enough. His latest piece for the Nation begins with a very different sentiment than the one he expressed not two years ago. Now, Hayden says, "It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car."

He goes on to write:

Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama's timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the eighteen-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.

We'll see. To be clear: I'll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era. But no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out.

It's one thing for liberals who've supported Obama to disagree with and criticize him over Afghanistan, for them to have been hoping he'd opt for a different direction. But arguments like the one Hayden's making -- and the one Michael Moore made in his recent open letter to the president -- just end up with those advancing them look foolish. It's like they dreamed up a list of policy positions for Obama, then convinced themselves that they actually were his positions.

Agree or disagree with Obama's decision, one thing is clear: The course he chose is not, as both Hayden and Moore have implied, some radical shift in his thinking. It's certainly not, as they've also implied, a betrayal of his campaign. Maybe they bought in to the argument from the right that Obama is a super-liberal, but it's just not so -- what he's done now is completely consistent with the position he's always taken on Afghanistan. He's always portrayed it as the good war, one of necessity as compared to a misguided war of choice in Iraq. While President Bush was in office, many liberals took the same position.

This was the substance of a hearing that eight Republican members of Congress -- or, as they styled themselves, the “Joint Forum on ACORN ” -- held Tuesday. Over the course of the hearing, representatives and witnesses actually leveled all the above charges at ACORN, declaring the issue to be one “of importance to the American people,” as Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., put it. (If he restricts the definition of "the American people" to members of his own party, he's probably right.)

Since its employees were caught on tape in the prostitution-tax evasion sting, ACORN hasn’t had a lot of defenders. But if you thought the subsequent halt of federal funding for the group was the end of the story as a political issue, then you don’t know the modern GOP. Despite the grievous damage to the group’s reputation, Republican officials aren’t content just to damn ACORN with evidence of its clear failings. Instead, at the hearing they insisted on citing an array of unconvincing, vastly overblown allegations -- with a bit of racial panic thrown in -- as evidence that ACORN is destroying America and must be prosecuted.

Probably the top charge against ACORN is that it tampers with elections. The rhetoric surrounding this argument continues to be out of line with the substance. Said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., “Our forefathers fought for, I don’t know, what, eight years to defeat the British because they didn’t want taxation without representation. And now we’re watching all these things being taken away, just frittered away, because we won’t enforce the law? It’s just criminal.”

As ever, there have been no instances cited of actual fraudulent voting, despite the implication that the entire electoral apparatus of the country is tainted. Nobody thinks voter registration fraud is a good thing, but the kind of fraud in which ACORN employees have been involved is extremely unlikely to affect the outcome of an election. The fraudulent registrations aren't intended to be used -- they're a way for the employee to squeeze some additional money out of the group by serving as proof they worked more than they actually did. 

At the hearing, there was a new wrinkle to the argument about registration fraud, an idea that by dumping a stack of inaccurate registrations on local election boards shortly before the deadline, ACORN somehow disenfranchises legitimate voters because the boards can't handle the workload. Again, however, there was no evidence provided for the claim. 

Still, there's no stopping these guys. Iowa Rep. Steve King took the crusade to bizarre new heights, saying he carries an acorn and a copy of the Constitution around all the time, to remind himself of the threat the one poses to the other. Then there was witness Hans von Spakovsky, a conservative election lawyer, who thinks that the failure to prosecute ACORN implicates the entire law enforcement apparatus of the federal government. Said Spakovsky:

Congress should not only hold direct hearings on ACORN and its activities, but also oversight hearings of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the Internal Revenue Service to obtain information on any investigations they are conducting into ACORN. If those agencies are not conducting any investigations, they should be required to explain why they are not carrying out their enforcement duties.

That would be, of course, almost exactly the argument that spurred some of the Bush administration's infamous firings of U.S. attorneys. The judgment of the fired prosecutors that there was no criminal case against ACORN for election fraud, in this line of thinking, didn’t exonerate ACORN -- it showed that the U.S. attorneys were incompetent at best.

And who could disagree, considering the almost superhuman way in which ACORN can apparently throw its weight around? After all, as several speakers at the hearing suggested, the group is just one huge criminal front. And, as Rep. Smith pointed out, ACORN’s got a guy in government. “President Obama previously served as ACORN’s lawyer, participated in ACORN training sessions in Chicago, presided on the board of two organizations that funded ACORN’s Chicago chapter.”

There are two separate points that need clearing up here. First, the president was never an employee of ACORN. He worked for Project Vote, which is now affiliated with ACORN but was not at the time, though the two groups were close. He also represented ACORN, alongside two other lawyers, in one case. Also on ACORN’s side in that case was the Department of Justice. Second, it could be literally true that Obama was an employee of the group back in the early ‘90s, and it wouldn’t really be that damning a charge. That’s because, despite Glenn Beck's fantasies, ACORN is not a vast criminal conspiracy. What it is, instead, is an often horrifically incompetent and sometimes corrupt but frequently helpful organization.

It’s easy to focus on the horror stories about ACORN (and important to condemn its various bad acts), but accounts of its role in bringing political power and useful advice to poor people go largely unheard. It should be possible, in other words, to work on a vast, successful and widely lauded voter registration drive without being smeared as a big-city gangster. Granted, ACORN isn't helping itself when it fails, many years running, to clean up its act. But it's also clear that at this point, that doesn't really even matter -- for many on the right, including members of Congress, the myth of the omnipotent, evil group is all that matters now.