IN THE MAIL: Andrew Sullivan’s new book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. Having never made any pretense at being a conservative, my interest in this topic is pretty much academic, but I’m pretty sure that this passage in the publisher’s blurb is wrong: “They have substituted religion for politics, and damaged both.”

In fact, there has been plenty of politics, and not all that much religion, out of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party over the past six years. There are theocrats and theocrat-wannabes out there, but they’re really not much in evidence in the Bush Administration’s policies, and the rest of the blurb certainly seems to suggest that Sullivan thinks otherwise. Perhaps the blurb doesn’t accurately reflect the argument in the book, which I haven’t read yet, obviously.