Author of the week: Rachel Maddow

last updated 8 January 2015

Rachel Maddow isn’t used to getting raves from anyone at Fox News, said Mary Houlihan in the Chicago Sun-Times. Most days, the folks at Fox are the MSNBC host’s ideological foes. So Maddow was happily surprised when Fox News CEO Roger Ailes agreed to write a blurb for her new book about U.S. military policy. Ailes labeled Drift “a book worth reading” and wrote that Maddow “makes valid arguments that our country has been drifting towards questionable wars.” Not exactly faint praise. “I asked him, but honestly didn’t expect to get a response,” Maddow says. “Roger Ailes and I have almost nothing in common, but one thing I think we do have in common is that we both enjoy confounding people’s expectations.”

It doesn’t hurt the book’s bipartisan appeal that it’s focused mostly on the past, said Jack Mirkinson in HuffingtonPost.com. Drift details a pre-9/11 expansion of executive power that has allowed presidents to carry on foreign wars with little public input, so Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan play more central roles than George W. Bush and Barack Obama do. The current president, she admits, has been a disappointment in this area. “Obama has been very happy to essentially maintain the radically expanded powers that he inherited from previous administrations.” Still, the wake-up she intends to issue is directed less at the White House than at her fellow citizens. In today’s America, “war has been essentially normalized,” she says. “That is the thing that bothers me the most.”