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Tavis: Andrew Sullivan is a widely read and respected social and political commentator whose work can be seen in the pages of 'Time' magazine, 'The New Republic,' and on the Web at 'The Daily Dish.' His new book is called 'The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back.' Andrew Sullivan, nice to have you here.

Andrew Sullivan: Great to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you. Let me start with these words. 'You asked me about accountability. It rests right here.' 'You asked me about accountability. It rests right here.' I know you find this hard to believe, but President Bush actually said that today while you were flying to Los Angeles in a press conference from the White House with regard to Iraq.

Sullivan: Good lord.

Tavis: What do you think of that?

Sullivan: It only took him three and a half years (laugh) to get there. I'm staggered. I think it just shows what the polls are saying. It took him that to actually take responsibility. He hasn't taken responsibility until now. He's been in denial. He's actually been not telling the truth about what's going on there. And I think the American people deserve to have a real discussion before these elections about what we're doing there, rather than after them.

He's gonna let Jim Baker fix it after the elections. Meanwhile, he's even changed the 'stay the course' thing now. I wish we'd had some honesty the last three years, and one of the reasons that I'm, as a conservative, sick of this administration is the dishonesty, and the way they haven't leveled with us, and the way we're sending young men and women out there to risk their lives, and not supporting them, and not having a strategy and a plan. And he's now taking responsibility, now? He should have taken responsibility a long time ago.

Tavis: Two follow-ups, Andrew. Number one, too little, too late?

Sullivan: Yes.

Tavis: Number two, what's behind the strategy, days out from an election, to come out and say this in a news conference? What's behind that strategy, you think?

Sullivan: He's trying to - they can see catastrophe coming. And they have gotta do something to rescue it. And I think what everybody, you and I know, everybody's talking about, everybody out there knows this, we're losing. And he didn't seem to even understand that we were losing. (Laugh) He kept saying that everything was going great, and anybody with half a brain and two eyes could see it's not going great.

So finally, I think they realized that unless they change and show that they have some contact with reality, people are gonna respond in these elections. So I think of this, I have to say, as a desperate pre-elections tactic. Not as a legitimate statement.

Tavis: I think the people - I wanna try this out on you, you're much closer to this than I am. The president, Mr. Rove, Secretary Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney; these people aren't idiots. They're not stupid. They have to know, to your point, the same thing the rest of us know, that we are losing. To stay the course on something that you are losing suggests to me that it must be about more than just winning this today.

There must be some other massive, over-arching agenda. Some geopolitical agenda. There's something behind here that says that we cannot throw in the towel. We have to stay the course. It's not just about winning, 'cause we're getting our behinds kicked in the polls every day. So what's that bigger thing that they're really after?

Sullivan: The terrifying thing, Tavis, is there isn't a bigger thing. The only terrifying thing is it's either bad or terrible. If we were to withdraw at this point, the consequences would be catastrophic. We have a country where the Sunnis and the Shiites are fighting each other; where the Shiites are now fighting Shiites; and where, if this becomes a really big civil war, you're gonna have ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis, and you're gonna bring Iran in, Saudi Arabia in, Jordan.

You're gonna have a huge regional war. And you're gonna have 140,000 American troops sitting there in the middle of it. We're facing catastrophe. I don't think people realize yet how bad it really is. And for him to have kept saying we're winning, and he even said that today. 'We're still winning.' We're not. And the government, Maliqi actually criticized him.

His own appointed prime minister said, 'We don't agree with this timetable. We'll do it when we want.' And Maliqi is letting these Shiite militias, who have infiltrated his own government, do what they want.

Tavis: I wanna jump to the text here in just a second. More specifically, we're already in it. Given what you've written, we're on it already. Let me ask you this, and I don't ask this, Andrew, out of any naiveté. But if the president, any president, is leading our country down a hell hole, isn't it then the responsibility of everybody, even those persons like you, in his party, to speak up? To be heard about this? And if in fact that is the case, why then aren't the Republicans, not born of trying to bash or mash their guy, but out of...

Sullivan: Patriotism.

Tavis: Exactly. So why not? Why are you and a couple of other people the only ones saying anything?

Sullivan: I don't know. I endorsed Kerry in 2004, because it was clear to me even then - (laugh) I supported this war, because I believed in good faith what I was told. That there were weapons of mass destruction. I believed in good faith they would send enough troops to win. I thought they were sane people. I trusted them, and they betrayed my trust. And so - and that was clear to me before the last election, Tavis. I think it's clear to anybody.

But their loyalties and their vested interests - a lot of these people in Washington who call themselves conservatives, they belong to think tanks. Karl Rove is a master at policing this movement. You say something wrong, you're cut off at the knees. So only a few of us were prepared to say, 'What is this? This isn't conservatism.' They have increased spending at a faster rate than any Democratic Congress since FDR. (Laugh) Now, that's conservative?

Tavis: Well, that means, then, for you to say what you're saying in this book and on this program and other places, it says to me one of two things, Andrew. Either you are, like, stuck on stupid, or (laugh) you're terribly courageous. Which one?

Sullivan: I don't know any other way but to tell the truth. And like this man David Kuo, I was diagnosed with a fatal illness 13 years ago, and one of the things I learned - HIV - and one of those things I learned was why not the hell tell the truth? Why are we, (laugh) what are we doing this for, Tavis? What are we writing books for? Why are we journalists, unless we're not looking at the world and seeing what's there?

George Orwell is my great hero - the writer - and he said, 'To see what's in front of your own nose is a constant struggle.' Well, it was in front of our nose. The spending; the recklessness. The debt that the next generation's gonna have to pay off was 20 trillion in 2000. It's 43 trillion today, because of these Republicans.

Tavis: But that's the problem, though, Andrew. The problem is that the truth is what each of us determines it to be. And that's what's got this country, with this vote, split in these major national elections.

Sullivan: No, the truth is those numbers are just the Government Accountability Office. (Laugh) No one can dispute that. But they've turned it away from reasonable argument to 'God made me president.' You believe in God. My support is based upon faith. Fundamentalist faith. And you support me because - Ann Coulter writes a book calling every Democrat godless.

And they use religion to keep people on their side. Even when the facts are against them. Now that, to me, as a Christian and as a believer, is blasphemy and wrong. And that's how they've done it. They've done it by organizing, by using religion, and by also a lot of people stood by him, even though they disagreed with him after 9/11, 'cause we were at war.

And you have a duty, whatever the president, Democrat or Republican, to stick by him for a while. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Well, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Every doubt I could possibly give. But for me, when Abu Ghraib happened, I realized that this president had authorized the torture of people. That last month, this Republican Congress violated habeas corpus. There's nothing more important than that. And that goes back to Magna Carta. That's the core of what America means.

Tavis: Help me understand then, again, another question, not out of naiveté, but I wanna get inside your head here. Tell me, then, why those persons in the religious right and, for that matter, just on the political right, stand by their man, given the litany of abuses that you've just laid out? They're not stupid, Andrew.

Sullivan: One word. Power. They love it. They're used to it; they got a lot of money from it. They're bribing the voters with pork barrel spending. They're getting a lot of money from big corporations to keep this whole thing on the road through K Street lobbyists. The number of lobbyists in Washington's gone - doubled since 2000. Money and power.

It's called corruption. You've got all - every branch of government's controlled by this one party. So every corrupt businessman who wants to bribe them (laugh) is flocking like flies to a picnic. And it's all about power, and standing up to it. There's an old phrase, 'telling truth to power.' It's hard. It's hard.

Tavis: All right, so we have...

Sullivan: This book is an attempt to say that. This book is an attempt to say, 'Enough.' If you believe in conservatism - conservatism, I'm not even a liberal. (Laugh) You and I may disagree about a lot of things, but for me, conservatism means limited government, individual freedom, balancing the budget, being responsible, not handing off the debt to the next generation, but taking responsibility.

Tavis: All right, so we have established in this conversation thus far how the conservative soul was lost. In the three minutes I have left, let's turn our attention to the latter part of the text, how you get it back.

Sullivan: Well, the only way you get it back is by re-stating your principles. And the first thing you have to do is talk. (Laugh) You have to make the argument, sincerely and faithfully and clearly. What does conservatism mean? It means to me basically individual liberty. Not the religious right bossing you around. (Laugh) It means keep the government out of my wallet and out of my bedroom. Leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.

Tavis: Let me press a little further on this, Andrew. Why does the goal have to be conservatism or liberalism, as opposed to the earlier formulation you put forth that I liked, that you and I could agree on - to your point that we don't agree on everything - why can't the goal just be truth?

Sullivan: Well, that too, Tavis. First of all, (laugh) we can disagree honestly. And honestly's the word there. So, yes, the first thing is truth. (Laugh) And once we establish the truth, then we can have an honest disagreement about it.

Tavis: I raise that only because that, to me, is the primary thing lacking in Washington today. It's not a left or right agenda. There aren't enough truth-tellers in Washington. And if we were to establish that as the base, which it ought to be anyway, then some of this left-right stuff wouldn't exist anyway. I say all the time, it's not about left or right, it's more about wrong and right. And that's what I think is missing.

Sullivan: It's calling it like it actually is. Instead of - when you hear this, (unintelligible) was like this, coercive interrogation technique. What does that mean? It means torture. Okay? (Laugh) Let's use English. Don't we use English? 'Stay the course.' What does that mean? It means we're screwing up. The first thing is the English language. Let's be truthful, and let's be honest. And there's so much vested interest in not being honest.

Tavis: Is it too late? This close to Election Day, all the prognosticators and pundits say that the Republicans are - you might as well go home, pack up now, you're not gonna win either house. If that, in fact, is the case for people who believe as you do, is it too late now? Should (unintelligible) a couple of years ago?

Sullivan: Oh, I want the Republicans to lose.

Tavis: You want them to?

Sullivan: Absolutely.

Tavis: Wow.

Sullivan: They deserve it. I'm asking people to vote Democrat or abstain. They need to lose.

Tavis: You're serious.

Sullivan: I'm absolutely dead serious. Said it on my blog today. Because they're so corrupted now, they've lost their own principles; they've lost their own soul. They deserve to be thrown out. And they need to be thrown out. And I'm not the only one saying this, Tavis. William F. Buckley, (laugh) George Will. There was a whole roster of conservatives in the 'Washington Monthly' saying they deserve to lose. So, I think there is an insurrection. I've been going around the country on this book tour. The people angriest are conservatives.

Tavis: That's hard to imagine, 'cause I know a whole lot of folk on this side who are very upset. (Laugh)

Sullivan: Well, I'm finding that I have strange allies now. People agree with me. Because the basic things we agree on, truth, honesty, and integrity, we can all, liberals and conservatives agree on, and that's what we've lost. That's what this president has robbed us of.

Tavis: Let's hear it for the truth. 'The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back.' Written by the always provocative Andrew Sullivan. Andrew, nice to have you here.

Sullivan: Great to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: It's a pleasure, sir. Up next, singer Nelly Furtado and a performance. Stay with us.