How the mighty are fallen! Or falling, anyway. Tony Blair is finished. George W. Bush is being deserted by the party he has wrecked, the submerging Republican majority. And Rudy Giuliani, only recently the front-runner for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, looks like a goner. Thanks to Pope Benedict, he probably has no hope of capturing the White House now.

Bush, of course, is the central figure in this contagion of ruin. Blair’s loyalty to Bush — he warned his fellow Englishmen that Saddam Hussein’s fearsome arsenal might strike them within 45 minutes — destroyed the plausibility of everything else he said. And Giuliani, a rodent who lacks the sense to desert the sinking ship, is now paying the price for his nakedly cynical betrayal of the Catholic faith.

“I hate abortion,� he has said lately; and everyone knows this is a naked lie. For nearly two decades his words and deeds have been emphatically proclaiming the precise opposite. No observer in his right mind would even suggest that Rudy Giuliani had the faintest moral qualms about feticide.

He has eagerly courted pro-abortion groups, called abortion “a constitutional right,� opposed restrictions on gruesome late-term killings of unborn children, applauded President Clinton’s veto of such restrictions, advocated forcing taxpayers to subsidize abortion, and more. His record couldn’t be more unequivocal.

Needless to say, he adds to all this the standard hypocrisy of modern abortion advocates: he has studiously avoided describing abortion with such plain Anglo-Saxon words as kill, death, and blood.

Here it’s instructive to read Book VII of the Politics of the great pagan philosopher Aristotle, who frankly recommends both abortion and infanticide in certain situations; refreshingly free of modern cant, he says simply that as a matter of good government, crippled infants should not be raised. Don’t expect such candor from a Giuliani.

Enter the Pope. Speaking in Brazil, without mentioning Giuliani by name, he made it clear that “the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with being in communion with the body of Christ� — a pointed reminder that a politician who promotes abortion has excommunicated himself.

This won’t stop the much-married Giuliani from continuing to gobble the sacraments of the Church — he evidently cares more about staying in favor with the New York Yankees than about fidelity to his professed religion — but it will certainly stop many Republicans, especially the Catholics he has lately been trying to woo, from voting for him in the party primaries.

In fact, Giuliani attacked Pope John Paul II in 1996 for condemning Clinton’s veto of the late-term abortion ban. Now he says his own positions on abortion — public positions, mind you — “are between me and my confessor.� So why make them public at all? Why not keep them private, in the intimacy of the confessional?

You have to wonder how often Giuliani visits that confessional, anyway. What does he think he needs to confess? Lukewarm support of Bush? He doesn’t appear to be a man who lets his religion cause him much inconvenience. His idea of charity is “public funding for abortions for poor women.�

Well, each of us has to apply the Sermon on the Mount in his own way. And nobody can say the abortion-hating Giuliani hasn’t found a way that is both original and unique.

Liberals accuse the Catholic Church and the popes of failing to speak out against evil, especially Nazism. Their favorite target is Pope Pius XII, whom the Nazi press in fact called “a mouthpiece for the Jews.� But of course they are not always delighted when the Church does speak out; then they accuse it of butting into politics and violating the separation of church and state.

Giuliani, a liberal who wants to be taken for a conservative, assures us that he won’t be taking orders from the Pope (just in case you were worried). Here’s hoping he won’t let that confessor push him around, either. We can only hope — and of course pray — that it’s not the same confessor who gives Nancy Pelosi her marching orders.

I wonder how Aristotle would define a Catholic these days. We can only guess, but I think he’d agree that papist is usually a misnomer.

The most beautiful religious movie I’ve ever seen is the 1947 French film Monsieur Vincent, which dramatizes the later life of St. Vincent de Paul, best known for his organizational genius in ministering to the poor.

It ends with a wise insight. The dying priest, played by the great Pierre Fresnay, tells a young nun always to keep her lovely smile: “Unless the poor know we love them, they will never forgive us for helping them.�

Excellent advice. I’ve known devout but obtuse Christians who have soured their own works of charity by unconsciously humiliating the people they meant to help — with scolding or moralism, or by wounding their fragile self-respect. No need to act morally superior to a starving beggar.

Sometimes I think the other side could use a bit of the same counsel. Too often today, the high and holy cause of unbelief is threatened by the smug sanctimony of the atheists.

Consider Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, whose title is perhaps self-explanatory. Religion poisons everything? Everything? Bach and Mozart? Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman?

And what about atheists like Stalin? Hitchens is ready for that one, citing Orwell: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy.� Besides, we may note, Stalin went to a seminary, where maybe he picked some bad thinking habits, which he couldn’t shake off when he stopped believing in God. Even bad atheists, it seems, can be chalked up to religion.

Now Hitchens himself, born English and naturalized American, is a learned and eloquent man. (I’ve debated him on politics, and I have the scars to prove it.) But when he gets on the subject of religion — any and all religion, mind you — he turns plain silly. Like so many of his breed, he seems to think he can settle an argument with a combination of British suavity and British snot. After reading him, I’m always surer I know whom he hates (or, less often, loves) than what he thinks.

And being erudite, he argues with impressive inductiveness, citing the usual horrors and then some — crusades, inquisitions, wars, jihads, Jim Jones, Jimmy Swaggart, 9/11, et cetera, filing them all under the same heading, Religion, as if they were all instigated by the same agency. (And let’s not forget the Scopes trial.)

It may seem ironic that Hitchens, a fierce defender of the Iraq war, blames religion for war, when the last two popes have opposed both Iraq wars; but then, he also seems to blame the popes for opposing them. As Huck Finn might put it, and as Hitchens would surely agree, popes is mostly a bad lot.

When you come right down to it, Hitchens’s case against religion is a more impersonal form of the old Phil Donahue argument, which may be summarized thus: Mean old nuns whacked my knuckles with a ruler, ergo God does not exist. This is less inductive reasoning than simple free association with a grudge. Religion reminds Christopher Hitchens of a lot of bad memories, even if they are historical rather than autobiographical. That is, they are bad things he’s read about, not necessarily experienced himself. Somehow I’d expected a more rigorous argument.

Now taking the broad view, I agree that, as a historical matter, a lot of boys, over the centuries, have had their knuckles whacked by a lot of nuns. But, waiving the question whether some of those boys brought it on themselves (especially if religion has an inherent tendency to produce bad boys like Donahue), we still await a demonstration that mean nuns can be traced to the Sermon on the Mount. And here, unless I am mistaken, lies the fatal lacuna in Hitchens’s thesis.

And here I return to the practical problem. If you really think belief in God or gods has always caused so much suffering (such as the Trojan War, a quagmire which I, as a Catholic, would have opposed from the start), then it seems to me that you ought to propagate atheism seriously — not just out of vanity to show how clever you are, but out of those same humanitarian motives to which you say religion is repugnant, and by which you claim to be driven. No need to humiliate the poor believers, is there?

But Hitchens still believes in Darwin and the Iraq war. Me, I still run with the popes, but I must say I admire his faith.

Thirty years ago, Laurence Olivier said a startling thing. He’d just seen the musical Sugar Babies, starring Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, and he pronounced Rooney “my favorite actor.�

I thought Olivier was joking, or maybe sarcastically putting down his rivals in the classical theater. I took Rooney for a minor Hollywood has-been, more notable for his eight marriages than for any achievement. (N.B.: Rooney is now late in his ninth decade, and as far as I know his eighth marriage is still going strong.)

But Lord Larry was serious, and he was right. He knew what it takes to go out on a stage and lift an audience’s hearts. When he saw Rooney, he recognized a greatness that deserved honor.

Mickey Rooney, born in 1920, was a child prodigy of entertainment — singing, dancing, acting. By 1934 he was a movie veteran who had done Shakespeare — starring as Puck in Max Reinhardt’s excellent film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A couple of years later, still in his mid teens, he was featured in what became the immensely popular Andy Hardy series, often co-starring with another amazingly versatile young talent: Judy Garland.

Rooney and Garland were synonyms, and close pals. Today she is the legend; he is all but forgotten. He was Hollywood’s top box-office draw for five straight years, against competitors like Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. He was world-famous and an Academy Award winner by age 20, long before Olivier, 13 years his senior. He could hold his own in straight drama with Spencer Tracy, his Oscar-winning co-star (as Father Flanagan) in Boys Town; the five-foot-three Rooney played the defiant juvenile delinquent.

Right after adolescence he commenced his eventful connubial life. His second wife was the big, voluptuous Ava Gardner. Many years and several wives later, he remembered her fondly. He showed up drunk on the old Tonight Show. It was broadcast live in those days, and any host but the flamboyant Jack Paar would have had the tact to whisk him off during a commercial break. Remember, this was the dull, repressed 1950s.

Instead, Paar took advantage of the moment to ask the question on everyone’s mind: “Tell us, Mickey, what is Ava Gardner really like?� Rooney did not disappoint. “Jack,� he slurred, “Ava Gardner is more woman than you will ever know.� The audience went berserk.

Rooney was no longer a superstar by then, but people still remembered when he had been. Now he was taking any role he could get. He was too old to play Huck Finn, too small for Coriolanus. But he could play Baby Face Nelson. Or whatever. And whatever he did, he did it well — drama, comedy, musical, dancing. Audiences remembered him and were glad to see him. He’d never stopped being a lovable, gutsy performer. Give him an audience and he was magic.

Critics didn’t adore him the way they adored Chaplin or, in France, Jerry Lewis. It might have jump-started his fading career if he’d become at least a victim of McCarthyism. No such luck. He just seemed to fade away in plain sight, for no better reason than that a whole style of cheerful entertainment had gone out of fashion. It was the era of Brando, except that Brando could make a comeback after a long slump and he’d still be hailed as a genius.

Not Rooney. He’d still show up for the Academy Awards ceremony every year, like an inexplicably jolly ghost from another epoch, bald and chubby. Now and then he even got a break, as in The Black Stallion in 1979, where he was still brilliant and moving; and in Sugar Babies he showed on the stage that he was also still much more than a fine character actor on film. If the greatest actor in the world was in the audience, after all those years Mickey Rooney could put a lump in his throat and make him grateful to be there.

Olivier said he never really learned to act until he realized he had to love both his character and his audience. Is there any really great performer of whom that isn’t true? You can see it even in brief film clips of little Mickey Rooney tap-dancing. That tiny boy had already learned the secret so many never learn. Love is the secret it does no good to keep.

Guess what this is about: Ruth Marcus, a pundit for the Washington Post, uses the abstract word procedure eleven times in a single column. She doesn’t use the word kill even once!

If you guessed that she is writing about abortion, you are correct. More specifically, she’s defending gruesome late-term abortions against a recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court.

No good progressive-minded liberal feminist would refer to a “procedure� in which the child’s skull is crushed and its brains sucked out as “killing.� It’s not as if someone winds up dead, is it?

The liberal conscience must rank among the wonders of the modern world. How do you defend a “procedure� so hideous that even most abortionists refuse to perform it? Ms. Marcus doesn’t defend it directly. Instead, she heaps angry sarcasm on Justice Anthony Kennedy’s recent majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart upholding state laws that outlaw this grim “procedure.�

With cutting wit, she refers to Kennedy as a “poor dear,â€� adding, “And I thought women were the ones who were supposed to be bad at science…. Indeed, Kennedy seems to be as weak at math as he is at science.â€� Oof! Take that, Kennedy!

Actually, Ms. Marcus doesn’t show that Kennedy is weak at either math or science, nor does she explain how she would know (or why it would be relevant) if he were; she just keeps piling on the catty wisecracks, proving only that she is irritable and, more important, morally callous. As for qualms about the deadly practice in question, Ms. Marcus dismisses these as “the moral whims of the majority.�

“Moral whims�? Most people would be sickened if they witnessed what Ms. Marcus is pleased to call this “procedure.� Killing, with its suggestion of blood and pain, sounds so abrupt. That’s why abortion advocates always try to muffle the plain facts in Orwellian euphemisms about “terminating pregnancies.� You don’t want to watch. And they don’t want you to see, even in your mind’s eye.

When you listen to liberals discussing abortion, you wonder how on earth they ever managed to get the public to confuse liberalism with compassion. I suppose it’s a sort of trick, like the stage magician’s misdirection. They keep you watching one thing so you don’t notice the other.

Stereotypes help, of course. In the case of abortion, the trick is to keep our minds on poor black inner-city girls, unmarried and pregnant, while diverting our attention from the real subject: the poor little shavers who, ineligible for liberal pity, are to be destroyed by the, er, procedure.

This has the added advantage of appealing, ever so subtly, to the sort of race and class prejudices liberals profess to deplore. Do we really want to encourage “those people� to breed? This angle emerges when we hear the cost/benefit argument for state-subsidized abortion: It’s cheaper than welfare!

From this point of view, a quick, timely, low-cost abortion today saves the taxpayer thousands of welfare dollars over the next two decades. Calculation, as well as “compassion,� argues for encouraging the poor to abort their children — and for having the state pick up the tab for the, er, procedure.

I have never, ever heard of poor inner-city blacks demanding subsidized abortions for themselves. So I can only wonder why so many affluent suburban whites, including liberals, are so eager to provide them. I suppose humanitarianism may explain it. In the case of Ms. Marcus, compassion seems to have run amok.

According to Jean-Paul Sartre, hell is other people; and I suspect that many of us secretly agree with this candidly misanthropic credo. (That’s what I like about the French: they don’t bother to hide their feelings, not even their nasty ones.)

Abortion is one way of controlling all those “other people,� who tend to reproduce with such annoying fertility; and I guess it takes a compassionate American like Ms. Marcus to say she favors aborting children for their own good.

We speak freely of “killing� some things, such as crabgrass, cancerous cells, and the germs that cause bad breath; but when we do away with kids in their mothers’ wombs, it’s just a “procedure.�

In this age of candor and explicitness, why such anomalous delicacy? Maybe it deserves a special name. I wonder what Adolf Hitler would call it. “Abortion denial�?

Even before they’d finished mopping up the blood at Virginia Tech, the Washington Post had some editorial counsel for Virginia: Adopt tougher gun control laws.

Thanks for the free advice, guys! If we citizens of Jefferson’s state adopt laws as strict as Washington’s, maybe we can get our murder rate down — possibly as low as Washington’s!

There is a danger that such editorials could feed an unfortunate stereotype: that liberals never learn, never take responsibility for the wreckage their policies produce.

Liberals and their “progressive� cousins, socialists and the unlamented Marxists, have always had one great gift: the ability to start stampedes. A murder spree always sets them off on gun control. In between atrocities, they revert to their normal default panics about global warming or nuclear winter. Whatever.

And let’s not forget their furor over Don Imus’s three-word atrocity. Leave it to Barack Obama, who has enjoyed his own liberal stampede, to liken Imus’s “verbal violence� to a madman’s murder spree. Obama is often described as “young,� though he is a middle-aged man, 45 years old; and I think I know why. He reminds you of the champion high-school orator, the bright, well-behaved boy who knows how to intone the platitudes the grownups love. He can see metaphorical violence everywhere except in skull-crushing late-term abortions.

Every alleged crisis provokes the progressive-minded fadsters to call for a massive increase in state power: economic depression, poverty, racism, gun violence, you name it — such evils must be not merely contained, but “eliminated,� posthaste, along with their “root causes.� (As far as I know, there is no such thing as a crisis that warrants hasty, or even eventual, government reduction.)

And behold the results! Our inner cities look like war zones — of the endless War on Poverty. This is only one of the myriad consequences of going progressive. The Great Society! And old folks may recall that striking down laws against abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy was going to make the horrid practice “safe, legal — and rare.� Today we have a million abortions a year, and the progressives who used to deplore it now insist that it’s a “fundamental human and constitutional right� — through all nine months.

A century ago, the Catholic poet Charles Peguy made a profound and prescient observation: “We will never know how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of seeming not sufficiently progressive.�

Even supposed conservatives now adopt the progressive style: the first President Bush with his New World Order and War on Drugs, his son with his War on Terror and enormous expansion of the colossal centralized state. The latter speaks of “eliminating tyranny from the earth�; implanting democracy in the Middle East would be only the beginning, spreading “freedom� (undefined) contagiously.

Both Bushes have left Americans themselves less free than before. And no wonder. Both look back with nostalgia to the worst war of all time, World War II, during which the United States fought side by side with Stalin and created the world’s most terrible weapons of mass murder.

Abortion and nuclear weapons have lost much of their power to horrify. Like Macbeth, we “have supped full with horrors,� except that Macbeth still realizes what he has done and knows what should horrify him.

The modern world’s case is worse. When you habitually violate your principles, you don’t just harden your conscience; you risk losing it altogether. You even wind up forgetting what your principles used to be.

Within living memory (though just barely), nearly all Christians agreed that contraception was immoral. Then, in 1931, the conservative Church of England decided that, though it was wrong in principle, exceptions could be made, but only for (say) married couples who couldn’t afford more children than they already had.

The Anglicans tried to uphold the principle of chastity — but with a few exceptions. But today, few Christians reject contraception. Only the Catholic Church, basically, still condemns it, but few Catholic priests dare to preach against it. That would seem “not sufficiently progressive.� Few even remember why chastity was ever considered a virtue.

It’s not that most people have changed their minds. Most people seldom use their minds; they merely follow fashion. We are now seeing what happens a generation or two after a fad catches on and goes unopposed.

You can call it progress. I prefer to call it amnesia. No wonder G.K. Chesterton said that “only the Catholic Church can save a man from the degraded slavery of being a child of his time.�