BROKAW:  And in it, you acknowledge when weapons of mass destruction were not found, everyone was startled and not very happy about that.  If that had been the case before war began, you couldn't have gotten congressional authorization.

ROVE:  Nor in all likelihood U.N. approval, as we had as well.

BROKAW:  Would you have launched the war if you had known there were weapons of mass destruction?

ROVE:  Well, as I say in the book, we would not have had either the authorization from Congress nor the U.N., and we probably would have found other ways to constrain his behavior.

There was no U.N. approval for the Iraq War.

The White House always argued that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 gave them legal cover for the war, but it did not--it warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to disarm.

As the U.N. weapons inspectors were reporting back from Iraq, the White House was seeking a second Security Council vote that would have officially sanctioned military action. That effort was unsuccessful, and the U.S./U.K. attack began without that Security Council approval.

This is not ancient history, nor is particularly obscure; coverage of Iraq and the U.N. weapons inspections in early 2003 was fairly intense, and Brokaw's NBC newscast aired several reports on the U.S. efforts to win U.N. support for a war resolution. (Brokaw himself on March 10, 2003, for example: "Tonight, the French vowed to veto any U.S. war resolution at the U.N., while Secretary of State Powell continued to look for votes and a plan that would allow the United States to go to war with some kind of U.N. approval.")

Rove undoubtedly knows this history, too. What he's counting on is that journalists like Brokaw will either not remember these facts, or will be too polite to bring them up.

Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former Army general and drug czar (under President Clinton) turned defense industry lobbyist. In a news article on McCaffrey entitled "One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex," the New York Times reported that McCaffrey had "earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." McCaffrey has appeared on NBC more than 1,000 times since 9/11/2001.

Retired Gen. Richard Meyers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Bush (2002-05). He is currently on the Board of Directors of Northrop Grumman Corporation, one of the largest military contractors in the world, and also of United Technologies Corporation, another large military contractor.

Sen. Lindsay Graham, Republican from South Carolina, a pro-war spokesperson who is one of the most regular guests on the Sunday talkshows.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, was apparently intended to represent the "other side" of the debate. Here is what he said: "Clearly we should keep the number of forces that we have.  No one's talking about removing forces."

"No one," in the above sentence refers to the American people, whom Levin understandably sees as nobody in the eyes of the U.S. media and political leaders. According to the latest (September 24) NYT/CBS News poll, 32 percent of those polled wanted U.S. troops out of Afghanistan within one year or right now. That was the largest group. Another 24 percent wants the troops "removed within one to two years." For comparison, the leadership of the Taliban is willing to grant foreign troops 18 months to get out of their country.

In other words, a majority of 56 percent of Americans wants U.S. troops out of Afghanistan about as soon as is practically feasible or even sooner. Yet Meet the Press--a mainstream network news talkshow since 1947--does not see fit to find one person to represent that point of view. The other major TV and radio talkshows that the right also labels "liberal" in the United States make similar choices almost every day.

When asked whether the U.S. should set a timeline for withdrawal, Levin answered "no."

This phenomenon of the non-debate is not confined to broadcast journalism; see recent FAIR Blog posts on fake Afghanistan debates in Time magazine (10/2/09), USA Today (9/17/09) and the Washington Post (9/01/09, 8/17/09).

These facts about public opinion are virtually always excluded from establishment media discussions, and those who advocate investigations and prosecutions--the view held by large percentages, if not majorities, of Americans--are virtually never heard from. That's because the belief that elites should be exempted from all consequences when they break the law is as close to a trans-partisan religious tenet of Beltway culture as it gets.

Consider yesterday's Meet the Press panel discussion of this issue involving David Gregory and five exceedingly typical Beltway insiders--the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein, Fortune's Nina Easton, Time's Rick Stengel, former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and former "moderate" Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. That's three ostensibly non-partisan journalists, a right-wing fanatic, and a New Republic/DLC Democrat from Tennessee whose career was built on proving how much he embraces GOP policies--that's called "diversity of views" in Establishment Media World.

Writing that, "exactly as one would expect, they were all in full and complete agreement that there must be no investigations or prosecutions," Greenwald heard "not a syllable uttered that political officials should be treated the same as ordinary Americans when they got caught breaking the law"--not that this should surprise anyone much: "As always, only the suffocatingly narrow Beltway consensus is heard in our political debates, even when huge percentages of Americans reject it." Listen to the recent FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Mark Danner on Torture" (4/10/09)

The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That's $2.3 trillion.  Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people--what people think of that government intervention? The Dow is one metric.  It closed on Friday at its lowest level since 1997, just over 7,000.

The Dow is not a measure about what "people" think about government policies. It's a measure of what the tiny, elite group of people who trade stocks think stocks are worth, which is to say what they think other people would pay for them. These evaluations have little to do with the long-term health of the economy. In some cases, a declining stock market might be good news for the economy, particularly if stock prices have been unrealistically inflated.

If you want to find out what people in general actually think about President Obama's economic policies, a better way to do so is to ask a statistically representative sample of them. Such efforts generally provide much more positive results than the Dow Jones "metric."

Someone whose feelings you can predict based on what the Dow does, though, is Gregory's NBC colleague Chris Matthews. When stocks go down, Chris Matthews gets mad. Here he is a couple of weeks ago (Hardball, 2/23/09):

I want to ask you when we get back, how does he deal with the fact that he has a scorecard now. It's called the Dow Jones. Every day now--first of all, they're going to nationalize the banks. Then they're not going to nationalize the banks. No matter what they say, the Dow keeps going down. It's down to almost 7,000 now. I used to think 8,000 was the floor. It's heading toward 6,000! People are really getting angry! I'm getting angry!

People have saved money, who are facing retirement, are ripped right now. It's absolutely disturbing, to put it lightly, what this must be saying to people who are retired now. They have a nest egg, a 401(k) that's now a 101(k). They are ripped. I'm only saying it the nice way. They are really angry and they're going to get mad at him if we don't get this market turned around.

We'll be right back with Howard Fineman and see how the president does with his scorecard, and Gene Robinson, can he deal with that Dow Jones scorecard every day in decline?

If you're pulling down a multi-million salary like Chris Matthews, you probably invest quite a bit of it and therefore you might have a lot to lose when the stock market goes down. Your personal losses don't turn the Dow Jones into a "scorecard" for the president, however.