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Anyone else out there see Andrew Sullivan on Bill Maher's show this weekend? Writing that book seems to have done wonders for the man, because he is most definitely on some sort of mission now. He's not just defending conservatism, he's defending Christianity, too. And I must say, although I don't agree with everything he says, I'm most definitely impressed.

UPDATE: More from Sullivan in this weekend's Times:

Until recently the rural evangelicals have stuck with the president, in part to honour the fallen, and out of admirable patriotism and trust. It is hard to believe that your son or daughter died or is permanently crippled for a bungled cause. But if the facade cracks, if these rural voters begin to believe they have been misled, then the rock-solid patriotic support could become something else. It would not, in my judgment, fade into indifference. It could turn into rage.

That hasn’t happened yet. But you can feel it beginning. When you add to it the libertarian Republicans, alienated by the religious right, the worries for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney mount. Then there are the fiscal conservatives appalled by the massive spending and borrowing, and the social conservatives who suspect the Republican leadership of covering up pederasty in its own ranks in the Mark Foley affair, and the neoconservatives who believe that their war was never given enough troops or resources to succeed. Put it all together and you have a party that is beginning to resemble a circular firing squad nine days before critical mid-terms[...]

There is, of course, a great justice in this. In many ways the Bush administration and Republican Congress have abandoned principled conservatism and deserve to be punished by conservatives more than liberals. When they took over in 2000, the long-term fiscal liability of the federal government was $20 trillion. It now stands at $43 trillion. They have increased government spending at a faster rate than any Democratic Congress since the 1930s. They have generated deficits after four years of strong growth.

This kind of spending has made sleaze and de facto bribery inevitable. The number of lobbyists in Washington has doubled in five years. As for pork barrel spending, a simple comparison tells the tale. In 1985, Ronald Reagan vetoed a motorway-construction bill because lawmakers had stuffed into it 150 pet projects for their constituencies. Reagan thought that was unconservative. Last year George W Bush eagerly signed a similar bill with 6,000 such projects. In plain English, they are bribing the voters with the public purse.

On the critical matter of individual liberty, they have suspended habeas corpus for “enemy combatants” for the indefinite future, and authorised the torture of military detainees. Last week Cheney told a conservative talk-show host that the question of whether to use the Khmer Rouge tactic of “waterboarding” military detainees to make them feel they’re drowning was a “no-brainer”. It wasn’t that he had weighed the terrible price of torture and decided reluctantly he had to do it to save American lives: it was not even worth a second’s thought. Whatever else this is, it isn’t conservatism. It is big government cynicism and incompetence.