What makes chickenhawkery such a distinctly American phenomenon is our culture’s coupling of aggressive militarism with a lack of anything even resembling shared sacrifice. Quite bizarrely, we celebrate those who rhetorically promote wars as “tough” and “strong” without requiring those very warmongers to walk their talk. Shielded from any personal risk of injury or death, the chickenhawk is thus permitted to wrap himself in an American flag and goose step his way through television studios as the alleged personification of patriotic bravery.

For years, chickenhawkery’s roots in this culture of unshared sacrifice have been a matter of theory — albeit a logical, well-grounded theory. But now, thanks to a comprehensive new study, we have concrete data underscoring the hypothesis. It suggests that many Americans’ aggressively pro-war ideology may fundamentally rely on their being physically shielded/disconnected from the human cost of war.

To document this connection, Columbia’s Robert Erikson and University of California at Berkeley’s Laura Stoker went back to the Vietnam War — the last time Americans faced wartime conscription. The researchers analyzed data from the Jennings-Niemi Political Socialization Study of college-bound high schoolers and subsequent interviews of those same high-schoolers from 1965 onward. In the process, they discovered that men holding low draft lottery numbers (and therefore more at risk of being drafted into combat) “became more anti-war, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft.” Importantly, for these men “lottery number was a stronger influence on their political outlook than their late-childhood party identification.” That influence transcended previous party affiliation and made a permanent impact on their politics into adulthood.

“Men with vulnerable numbers show evidence of totally rethinking their partisanship in response to the threat of the draft,” the researchers report. “Republicans in the group abandoned their party with unusual frequency, while even Democrats moved toward the independent category with slightly greater frequency than others.”

By contrast, “for men with safe lottery numbers, the continuity of party identification” — and militarist ideology — “was relatively unaffected by the draft.”

Reporting on the study, Miller-McCune notes:

Why did the prospect of being drafted make such a strong and lasting impact on the men’s ideological outlook? Erikson and Stoker suggest this may be a case of self-interest trumping abstract ideas. They note that the risk of being drafted provoked intense “anxiety and fear,” which caused many to rethink previously held beliefs, either as a direct emotional response or because it prompted them to get better informed.

This part of the study about “self-interest” is almost certainly the key factor in two generations’ worth of high-profile chickenhawkery.

For chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney who grew up during Vietnam conscription, deft draft-dodging provided them safety and psychological distance from bloodshed. As the data show, compared to draftees, that distance likely made them feel comfortable demanding other people face death on the battlefield, knowing that they wouldn’t face such a fate themselves. Put another way, having avoided the draft, there was no “self-interest” in opposing war — indeed, there was only self-interest in promoting wars in a media and political environment that increasingly rewarded rank bellicosity.

For younger, post-Vietnam-era chickenhawks (think, say, the chipper lily-white warmongers who populate the editorial staff of tiny-circulation elite Washington magazines like the National Review, New Republic and Weekly Standard) the same dynamic remained. Despite living in an era of “persistent conflict,” these precocious youngsters never faced a lottery or draft (or even the threat of a modest tax hike!). So, just like their older brethren, their incessant demand that other people go off to die in wars never comes with even the vague possibility that the chickenhawks themselves will have to leave their comfortable D.C. offices and face the bloodshed they so vehemently endorse. And as the data show, without such a possibility, people seem far more supportive of militarism. That’s especially true for chickenhawks in today’s war-glorifying media, where “self-interest” is now defined as warmongering, not the opposite.

No doubt, the antiwar voices who have recently argued for the reinstatement of a draft will find fuel in this Berkeley/Columbia report. They argue that viscerally connecting the entire nation to the blood-and-guts consequences of war will make the nation less reflexively supportive of war — and the new data substantively supports that assertion. That’s why in the midst of (at least) three U.S. military occupations, this report is almost sure to be ignored by our chickenhawk-dominated political class — because it too explicitly exposes the selfish, self-centered and abhorrent roots of the chickenhawk ethos that now plays such an integral role in perpetuating a state of Endless War.

Which makes the following nugget all the more enraging:

Politicians who supported the industry had tried for years to exempt fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the 1974 law that regulates the injection of waste and chemicals underground. The EPA’s 2004 study was used to justify that effort. With the help of then-Vice President Dick Cheney — the former head of Halliburton — President George W. Bush’s landmark energy legislation, the 2005 Energy Policy Act, included a provision that prohibited the EPA from regulating fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Regulation would be left to the states, many of which had underfunded agencies, looser standards and less manpower than the federal government.

Halliburton, incidentally, pioneered hydrofracking technology.

Perhaps my imagination is limited, but I am struggling to think of anything more appropriate to be regulated by the EPA, under the auspices of the Safe Drinking Water Act, than a process in which vast amounts of toxic chemicals are injected deep in the earth. Half a decade later, no less a regulation-hating state than Texas found itself passing a law requiring frackers disclose what chemicals they employ when extracting gas. That kind of thing seems like something that maybe should have been required from the outset, rather than years later — but I guess we should be familiar with the pattern now. Congress proactively exempts some potentially dangerous practice from federal regulation — like, say, credit derivatives — and then scrambles for cover after the inevitable disaster.

Cheney made the comment while proclaiming the need to combat the national debt. That may seem an odd sentiment to those who remember that in 2002 he reportedly told then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, “deficits don’t matter.“

Meanwhile, the object of Cheney’s affection is, of course, the current of face of the GOP’s version of deficit hawkishness — one that Democrats hope to make a liability for Republicans in 2012. Despite a united effort by Republicans in the Senate Wednesday to rally around Ryan’s proposal, a number of party members have called the proposal too extreme, perhaps fearing that backing it could carry serious electoral consequences.

Update (13:07): It is not only Fox affiliates struggling with their “Obama”s and “Osama”s. Virginia-based NBC 12 reported on “Obama’s death”, as this screenshot (another Twitter hit) illustrates:

Update (12:41): As far as reporting flubs go, mixing up “Obama” with “Osama” is pretty much as fatal as it can get on a day like today. Two separate Fox affiliates made this very mistake.

Fox 40, the Sacremento-based local station made the gaffe in the text scroll at the bottom of the screen which broke the news: “Obama Bin Laden dead”. The below image spread across Twitter like wild fire.

And, following President Obama’s announcement of the Al-Qaida leader’s death, an anchor for New York-based Fox 5 said “President Obama is in fact dead” before correcting himself after some prompting.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have both congratulated President Obama on hearing the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. But Fox News seems unwilling to let the glory linger on the president for even a moment. The cable network’s website homepage chose to feature former president Bush predominantly, with the only mentions of Obama in small type under a large picture and headline devoted to his predecessor.

Then there was some sort of lengthy panel about Ronald Reagan. My favorite part was when a speaker began an anecdote by saying, “Ron Reagan Jr. — don’t boo …” (Second-favorite part was when a guy said that Reagan “was even more tea party than Jefferson.” He was more like the Founders than the actual Founders, themselves.)

There was a horrible panel about gay marriage and other “social issues,” with two black religious conservatives. One of them, Bishop Harry Jackson, attempted to whip the crowd into a frenzy with an anti-gay, anti-”civility” mini-sermon, but was forced to say to the lily-white crowd, “somebody needs to clap or shout or do something in this place” to get a response.

Rick Santorum entered to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop.” I guess everyone finally forgot the ’90s.

The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre played a clip of Charlton Heston bemoaning people who try to exploit tragedies to advance their political agendas. Then he repeatedly invoked the names of people killed in shooting massacres, asserted that they were murdered by “gun-free zones,” announced that “our women” were being raped as he spoke, and even played a harrowing 911 call from a victim of a home invasion. I am not even particularly left-wing on the subject of gun control and I found it to be a breathtakingly shameless and disgusting performance.

While Justin already covered the weird Donald Trump appearance, there was one line of Trump’s speech that bears repeating: “If I run, and if I win, this country will be respected again.” Right. Once we elect the bankrupt TV make-believe tycoon huckster, people around the world will say to themselves, “They finally got it right.”

Donald Rumsfeld arrived to accept his “defender of the Constitution” award. There were boos. Dick Cheney, introduced to introduce Rumsfeld, was called various names, though the boos were then drowned out by “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants. As Cheney began his lengthy, boring story about his “meet-cute” with Rumsfeld, the crowd mostly settled down, except for scattered shouts from, I presume, antiwar Ron Paul supporters, who were promptly shouted down by patriots.