Historical precedent has been getting a lot of play in the news lately. Whether they’re discussing financial collapse or imperialist expansion, decaying morals or civil rights, pundits love to center on a few, oft-cited examples: the Great Depression, Vietnam, Hitler. By mixing historical anecdote into their analysis, the talking (and twittering) heads try to add a touch of gravity and validity to their arguments.

The problem, though, is that many of our sources have been so manipulated and so mangled, so misinterpreted and misunderstood that, in everyday political discussion, they have become meaningless.

Take the “Founding Fathers,” favorite touchstone of self-righteous liberals and conservatives alike. In recent months, the image of our bewigged forebears has been called upon to justify everything from gay marriage to gun rights, from war-making to withdrawal, from deregulation to nationalization. Applied to everything, the “Founding Fathers” have come to mean nothing.

But how does this obfuscation come about?

First, certain individuals, events or ideas come to be sanctified. Torn from the controversies and contradictions of their historical milieu, they are ascribed an infallible ability to shed light on current events. Hence the invocation of Jefferson (a slave owner) in debates over civil liberties; the citing of the Second Amendment’s firearms clause (skipping the “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State … ” bit) in arguments over guns; the references to Neville Chamberlain (whose outlook was dominated by the horrors of World War I) in discussions about American aggression.

Next, commentators and revisionists embellish the back-stories of these towering figures and ideas, cleaning up what they see as the “messy” bits and adding more favorable (or sinister) dimensions. John F. Kennedy, a fumbling, philandering imperialist, is recast as a savvy diplomat and warm-hearted family man; the 1990s, when much of America was serving as a battlefield for the War on Drugs and our prison populations exploded, is reimagined as the halcyon age of prosperity.

This sloppy appropriation of historical precedent can be dangerous, of course — by blurring details and speaking in platitudes, we risk slipping into misinformed, generalized nonsense, and losing the valuable lessons that can be gleaned from the past. But the results can also be humorous.

During the 1984 presidential campaign, for example, Ronald Reagan invoked Bruce Springsteen and “Born in the U.S.A.” as models of American pride and virtue. Maybe if he’d actually listened to the tune (“You end up like a dog that’s been beat to much / ’Til you spend half your life just covering up / Born in the U.S.A.”), the president may have avoided public embarrassment.

The lesson seems to be that pundits and politicians alike should shy away from invoking historical stereotypes. Of course, their interest is not in enhancing our understanding of the past, but in convincing people to listen and vote. If their examples become a host of empty signifiers, so what? It’s the rhetoric that counts.

But sometimes even those empty signifiers are not enough. Occasionally, one is forced go beyond the stage of embellishment and veer into sheer invention.

Take Glenn Beck’s recent seminar on fine art on Fox News. Searching New York City for signs of pinko infiltration, Beck discovered that the Rockefellers — as everyone knows, bastions of the anarcho-commie-atheist establishment — had planted hammer and sickles in their eponymous Center; he also realized that a generic male figure in a Rockefeller Center relief is supposed to represent Mussolini (despite the fact that no actual art critics believe this, and that Mussolini was not, shall we say, a hero to the proletariat).

Most dumbfounding, though, are the recent efforts of Conservapedia, a website which seeks to eliminate “liberal bias” in education. Their newest project is an effort to stamp out the “pro-liberal” elements of the Bible. That’s right: these hacks want to edit the word of God.

They claim that English translations have “emasculated” and de-conservatized the original text, so their mission is to pinpoint suspect passages and rewrite them in the way that (their white, conservative) God really intended them. This might include substituting “intellectuals” or “Liberals” for “Pharisees,” or toning down the use of the word “laborer.” One wonders whether they’ll a chance to include “The Parable of the Welfare Queen.”

These final two examples are, of course, rather extreme. Most commentators do not stretch their imaginations to such lengths in order to twist their sources into saying what they want. But the spirit behind such endeavors — the prioritization of message over truth, of ideology over fact — is pervasive. And until we learn to properly use our sources, we’ll be stuck spinning the same wheels — just like those Soviets endlessly rehashing Marx, or those fascists mindlessly spouting Nietzsche. Only different.

Ted Hamilton, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is one of the Sun’s Arts and Entertainment Editors. He may be reached at thamilton@cornellsun.com. Brain in a Vat appears alternate Wednesdays this semester.