As Rick Perlstein observes, almost all of this year's Pulitzer winners in journalism owe a debt of gratitude to the conservative movement for creating and implementing the ideas that produced the calamities unveiled in their exceptional reporting. I would add, though, that the media in general have largely failed to draw the connections linking the right-wing's belief system and policies to outcomes like children harmed by unsafe toys and cribs, the importation of poisonous pharmaceuticals from China, the transgressions attributable to private security contractors in Iraq, abuses of power based on the sham "unitary executive" concept, negligent management of a government-run hospital, and the subprime fiasco. Even in most of those award-winning articles themselves, relatively little effort was made to underscore the reality that the conservative movement's hostility toward government was the root cause of those failures of government.Continue reading on the Taking Note Blog