As Rick Perlstein observes, almost all of yesterday'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.

The conundrum is that all of these failures reinforce the conservative movement's message that the government can't do anything right. But it was the systematic budgetary strangling of agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the FDA, beginning in the Reagan administration and then resuming with the ascent of Newt Gingrich in 1994, that greatly weakened agencies responsible for ensuring that toys and medicines are safe. Those "successes" of the conservative movement helped to produce the failures documented by the Chicago Tribune and New York Times. The privatization of security services (not to mention the Iraq War itself), was also an outgrowth of the right's agenda, which preached that private companies can do just about anything better and more cheaply than the government itself. The unitary executive idea that provided cover for Dick Cheney's shenanigans, including his efforts to short-circuit anti-torture laws, was nurtured for years in the right's well-funded Federalist Society, whose many famous conservative members include John Yoo. And neglect of public facilities and institutions like Walter Reed Army Medical Center has become endemic because of a combination of tax and budget cuts, combined with leadership in the hands of ineffective ideologues who are hostile to civil servants.

Unfortunately, the commentary pages of the same newspapers include only a small minority of regular columnists who try to help readers recognize that conservatism has failed as a governing ideology. Hopefully one of them -- maybe Paul Krugman, Harold Meyerson, or E.J. Dionne -- will earn a Pulitzer next year.