Rachel Maddow Drops a Truth Bomb On Republicans Who Want War With Russia

[okaawhatever]

18. Pretty much that getting involved in WWII was okay but not the other stuff. She wrote a book called

Drift: The Unmooring of the American Military Power. Here's a link to a review in Slate, and an excerpt from the review:

Maddow has two problems with Johnson’s decision. First, it divided the military from the rest of the country in a way that previous wars had not—and that the end of the draft has perpetuated. Since 9/11, Maddow writes, less than 1 percent of the U.S. population has been called on to serve. This has drastically altered how presidents tally the cost of going to war. “We’ve never been further from the ideal of the citizen-soldier, from the idea that America would find it impossible to go to war without disrupting domestic civilian life,” Maddow writes.

SNIP

Maddow is very good on the master of executive-branch high jinks, Ronald Reagan. We first meet him starring in World War II propaganda films for the Army Air Corps’ First Motion Picture Unit, better known as Fum-Poo. Forty years later, as president, Reagan seems like he’s still in a movie when he tilts at the windmill of “Soviet-Cuban militarization” by attacking Grenada. Maddow reminds us just how thin the justification for bombing that small island really was: In an Oval Office speech, Reagan made Grenada’s new airfield sound like Castro’s personal launching pad when in fact it was built for tourists with funds from the British government. These are details that I’d forgotten. By making us remember, Maddow doesn’t just send up Reagan. She reminds us how easy it is for the government to make claims that are utterly ridiculous only in retrospect.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/03/rachel_maddow_s_drift_reviewed_by_emily_bazelon_.html