We live in the "blowback" years. By blowback we mean, what goes around comes around. Unforeseen consequences, or foreseen but ignored. Unleash the mujahiddeen on the Soviets in Afghanistan, and you end up with Osama bin Laden. Blowback always comes as a shock, because the art of politics is to separate actions from consequences.

A nation always on the war path mans a nation always under arms and a country to which the war is always coming home -- a potent minority in the form of psychically maimed people, violence-prone drunks, domestic abusers, drug addicts and basket cases. This summer, before John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo embarked on their terrible jihad, the whole issue of Wars Coming Home had turned red hot with the murders and suicides in Fort Bragg, N.C.

On June 11 Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves, 32, of the 3rd Special Forces Group, shot his 28-year-old wife Teresa, and then himself, in their bedroom, as Teresa’s sister and other relatives sat downstairs. He had returned from Afghanistan only two days before, having requested leave to resolve "personal issues"

Marketing a war is serious business. And no product requires better brand names than one that squanders vast quantities of resources while intentionally killing large numbers of people.

The American trend of euphemistic fog for such enterprises began several decades ago. It's very old news that the federal government no longer has a department or a budget named "war." Now, it's all called "defense," a word with a strong aura of inherent justification. The sly effectiveness of the labeling switch can be gauged by the fact that many opponents of reckless military spending nevertheless constantly refer to it as "defense" spending.

During the past dozen years, the intersection between two avenues, Pennsylvania and Madison, has given rise to media cross-promotion that increasingly sanitizes the organized mass destruction known as warfare.

The first Bush administration enhanced the public-relations techniques for U.S. military actions by "choosing operation names that were calculated to shape political perceptions," linguist Geoff Nunberg recalls. The invasion of Panama in December 1989 went forward under the

AUSTIN, Texas -- The famous Texas two-step is getting a heavy workout in Washington. You glance away for just a moment to watch the World Series and -- oops -- we're no longer for regime change in Iraq.

We've spent the last two months having it pounded into our brains daily that we must have regime change in Iraq, nothing else will do. But now -- not so. Well, you say, people are allowed to change their minds, even presidents. But that's where we come to the awkward part, because the administration is insisting it hasn't changed its mind at all, it never demanded regime change and it's all our fault for being so stupid as to have misunderstood them. This is the White Queen stage, she who could believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Two hundred years of American democracy could definitively end November 5, starting in Missouri.

No matter what happens in the overall election, the race for the US Senate seat from Missouri will determine who controls the Congress on November 6. Should incumbent Democrat Jean Carnahan lose, the Republicans will immediately take control of the US Senate. They could then use a lame duck session to destroy the last vestiges of the American system of checks and balances. They are confident this will happen, and are spending millions to make sure it does.

The upper chamber is now divided between 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans and one brave independent. Elected as a Republican, Vermont's Jim Jeffords chose independence in the face of the Bush blitzkreig. His profile in courage is stamped on the last check and balance in American government.

With a ruthless hard-right cabal in charge of the Executive Branch, the Republicans have moved to complete their definitive conquest of the judiciary and the media.