Maybe you were rendered mildly ill by John McCain's tactical and expedient embrace of George W. Bush after George W.'s henchmen slandered McCain shamelessly in the South Carolina primary of 2000.

Maybe your appetite was disturbed even more by McCain's tactical and expedient ingratiating with Jerry Falwell four years after telling the plain truth and branding the massive preacherman an "agent of intolerance."

If so, here's some medical advice: Don't go near Rudy Giuliani for a while.

Last week the word went out that Giuliani, aka "America's Mayor," had beheld his celebrity's lead among Republican presidential prospects in the latest Gallup Poll and found himself unable to resist. He actually will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, Robert Novak reported.

That must be right. The next day Giuliani was in Pennsylvania campaigning with and for U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. Why would he put himself through that except for some broader personal reward?

Novak wrote that Republican insiders believe Giuliani can compete effectively for the presidential nomination, but only if he adapts at least one of his three blatantly liberal positions on burning social issues.

Suffice to say that no one in modern American public life -- not Hillary Clinton, not John Kerry, not Ted Kennedy -- has been to Rudy's left on those three defining social issues, the ones on which God reportedly commands Republicans to get to the far right.

Giuliani seems to be progressive, enlightened, tolerant, cosmopolitan and worldly. There's no place or excuse for that in modern-day Republicanism.

Let's run down those three positions:

1. Giuliani has said he supports a woman's right to an abortion, even public funding thereof to protect the rights of poor women, and that he'd give his daughter money for an abortion. Asked about so-called partial birth abortion, Rudy has said he has no problem with it.

2. Giuliani has said a gun owner ought to be like a motorist in that he should pass a test for a license.

3. "I'm pro-gay rights," Giuliani has said. As mayor of New York City, he oversaw policies that bestowed broad legal rights on gay partnerships. During his messy divorce, he moved in for a while with wealthy Manhattan friends who were gay.

All of that will require some seriously ambitious temporizing, which means "to act to suit the time or occasion" and "to yield to current or dominant opinion."

To put it another way, selling your soul.

It's hard to imagine Giuliani surviving among modern Republicans, especially in the vital South, without changing wholesale not just one, but all three of those positions.

Abortion would seem to be the easiest and the least of it. He could simply say that he had come to realize that abortion ought to be left to the states. He'd euphemistically be calling for an end to federal abortion rights. That he'd be selling out the very poor women whose rights he once defended would pose but a minor inconvenience.

But if you want to compete politically these days from Texas eastward through Mississippi and Alabama and on to the Carolinas, you need above all else to get right on the G's, meaning God, guns and gays. Selling out poor women on abortion simply won't get the job done. Poor women can't get abortions in many areas of the South already.

Telling Bubba to take a test to get a gun to protect his family and slay deer, then explaining to him that some of your best friends are godless homosexuals -- well, not even the great hero of 9/11 can get away with that.

By the time Rudy finishes this makeover, McCain's maneuvering may seem steadfast.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.