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Teach the Fundamentals September 23, 2005 Download Windows Media PlayerListen to Rush Conduct Broadcast Excellence via Windows Media Player (highly recommended by poster) BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I got an e-mail last night, and I get a few of these but there's so much e-mail, I don't have a systemized response. But something about this e-mail I got yesterday compelled me to reply. It was an e-mail for a college student out in Oregon, and he had been given an assignment by his liberal professor. It's a big essay question related to a theory in some journalist's book, and he...

Not long ago, while waiting to meet some friends for dinner, I dropped into a bookstore where I happened to glance through the political bestseller, What's the Matter With Kansas? -- a title borrowed from a once famous article by a once famous editor, William Allen White. I didn't buy the book, nor did I have enough time to read very much of it. But, then, who needs to read very much of any bestseller nowadays? Thanks to the thoughtful tendency of modern publishing houses to restrict themselves to publishing books that can be summed up in a single sentence,...

The outcome of last November’s election was a long time in the making. It is clear, in the easy wisdom of hindsight, that the Democratic Party’s descent into its present minority status began more than thirty-five years ago. Starting with Richard Nixon’s narrow capture of the White House in 1968, Republicans have won seven of ten presidential elections. (They had lost seven of the previous nine.) More significantly in terms of party standing, their marginal pickups in the House and Senate that year presaged their eventual emergence by the 1990s as the majority party in Congress. For those of us...

June 13, 2004 'What's the Matter With Kansas?': Heartland SecurityBy JOSH CHAFETZ WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. By Thomas Frank. 306 pp. Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $24. IKE the most vitriolic of right-wing pundits (Ann Coulter springs unbidden to mind), Thomas Frank has a distinctly Manichean worldview. The political universe, for him, is divided between the good guys and the conservatives. The conservatives are further divided between the fools and the knaves. The fools are ''the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what...

PARIS, FRANCE--Notre Dame sits proudly in the middle of the River Seine, which winds its way through this ancient city. It is an impressive Cathedral, with its towering gothic arches and vaults, its captivating chapels, and its rich history. Although the French still celebrate July 14, when a rowdy mob of radicals freed some non-political prisoners from the Bastille, they are still sober about the excesses of the French Revolution. For one, they seem to realize that it was silly for those Revolutionaries to expel the Church from France and turn Notre Dame into the "Temple of Reason." Still, they...

Not a thing, it turns out.Kansas is a reliable "red" state; President Bush carried it by nearly 21% in 2000 and padded his margin to nearly 26% this year. The state's rock-solid support of Mr. Bush and other conservative candidates has sent at least one of its native sons, political commentator Thomas Frank, into paroxysms of rage. In his new book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?," Mr. Frank argues that all those Jayhawk State rubes have got things backward: They've continued to vote Republican as the state goes through economic hardship, even though, by doing so, they're voting against their...

Red State Victory There is something pleasantly wacky about the response of Lefty scribblers to the Republican election victory. The obvious reasons therefor, such as the voters' estimate of the trustworthiness of the Republican candidates and of the coherence of their message never occurs to blue-state pundits as they scratch their double-domes in bafflement. At the end of their cognitive tunnel, a bulb glows dimly. Then, they begin to realize that red-state voters were ignorant dolts, deluded troglodytes, primitives, fanatical Bible-toting NASCAR retards. So intellectually deprived were these plebs that it was a wonder they managed to find their way...

It's rare that a single book encapsulates an entire misbegotten mindset, but What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank manages the trick. Frank, a journalist and native Kansan who has written articles for Harper's and The Nation, and whom the Los Angeles Times has called "one of our most insightful social observers," argues that hardworking blue collar Kansans have been duped into voting against "their fundamental interests" -- as evidenced by their consistent support of Republican candidates. According to Frank, the poor deluded hicks fail to realize that Democrats are their true...