Timothy Egan on the Know-Nothings

Today’s NY Times has an excellent piece by Timothy Egan about the current Know-Nothing movement in the country, and its dangerous implications:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/building-a-nation-of-know-nothings/
What he does best is summarize some of the most ridiculous claims of this fake movement, a bedraggled dog trotting along the heels of the Tea Party parade. Obama is being targeted as “guilty” for the failure of bailouts that occurred during the Bush administration, and even the success of some of these bailouts (that personally I have mixed feelings about, but you have to read a book as detailed as Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail to understand what led to some of these bailouts) is being ignored—such as the resurgence of the American auto industry—in a clamor against the fraudulent Socialism claims.
Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (2005) is an amazing book about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His new book, The Big Burn (2009), is on my wannaread list. He’s one of our best nonfiction writers, and is particularly good on issues of the West.