At the end of July, MSNBC’s biggest and dullest conspiracy theorist got some very bad news. After over a year of booming ratings, The Rachel Maddow Show’s viewership had crashed. It had been a long road for Maddow, the former blonde Catholic high school girl who had decided she wanted to be a media personality and ended up with an MSNBC show through the efforts of Keith Olbermann. And after Keith was gone, MSNBC had to settle for a slightly less effeminate version of Olbermann. Maddow had retained the key elements of Olbermann’s personality, the unhinged conspiracy theories, histrionic delivery,...