One man with courage makes a majority. — Andrew Jackson

One man without courage makes a majority. — John Roberts

One man without perspective makes for hilarity. — Grandy at Popehat

As requested by a leading authority, we took a scientific poll of the entire internet yesterday, assisted by you, our valued readers.

The goal? To find the most hysterically overwrought, or most pissily priggish, reactions from people who believed that they "won" or "lost" in the United States Supreme Court's decision of the consolidated Affordable Care Act cases, or the contempt vote against Attorney General Eric Holder.

We had many strong entries. The early favorite in our voting, submitted by commenter Jober and several others, came from Patrick (no relation) Gaspard, the executive director of the Democratic National Committee, who tweeted this:

Of course, Gaspard's tweet, reflecting the President's oft-stated goal of moving beyond partisanship, to an America that is neither red nor blue, was a refinement and an elaboration on an earlier tweet (sadly now deleted), which read:

TAKE THAT, MOTHER******S!!

As potential Democratic voters, we're glad that Patrick Gaspard presents himself as such an articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking executive director of his Party's national committee.

Moving on…

The artists of the world spoke out against injustice, best typified by this picture, which is surely worth a billion words:

Among those words would be "Planet", "Of", "The", "Apes", "Red", "Dawn", and "OMGWTF911!!!". Thanks to CWK for sharing.

Ann Bransom pointed out that little people can speak with all the eloquence of political dignitaries such as Patrick Gaspard, and artistic luminaries like the master behind the "Day Freedom Died" photoshop. Don't believe me? Listen to EastKy, commenting at the Lexington Herald Leader:

There goes my marriage. It's a sad comment on where our freedom is headed when a marriage has survived everything that can be thrown at a marriage and after 37 years of vowing to stay together no matter what we will now be forced to divorce because he cannot afford to add me to his insurance and would now be forced to do so. Our young men and women have fought nad died for our freedom only to have our president and congress take it away.

One hesitates to tell EastKy, who has no doubt had a rough life, that when the husband to whom she's been married 37 years tells her he needs a divorce because the government has forced him to add her to his health insurance policy…

Well, one hesitates to tell her.

As great as all of those reactions, and many more, were, we were all inspired, moved, and in fact awed by the constitutional analysis of Ben Shapiro, the noted graduate of Harvard Law School, syndicated columnist, bestselling author, Breitbart.com Editor-At-Large, and Freedom Center Shillman Journalism Fellow.

Our butts hurt in sympathy for Mr. Shapiro, and for America.

Now, we didn't attend Harvard Law (well, one of us did, but he's a Stanford man at heart), and so we have no fancy book-larnin in the law, but we were motivated to learn by Shapiro's subsequent challenge to find a case more awful than yesterday's. Was National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius the greatest destruction of individual liberty (presumably at the hands of the United States Supreme Court, which allowed us to disregard extrajudicial and foreign tragedies such as the Great Leap Forward and GULAG) since Dred Scott?

And in our many seconds of study, we could only name six:

Korematsu v. United States, in which the Supreme Court affirmed the deportation of every Japanese American from California to a concentration camp;

Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court affirmed that states could segregate Dred Scott's descendants, now American citizens, into separate facilities such as schools and buses, facilities which turned out not to be quite equal to those provided the descendants of Dred Scott's master;

Schenck v. United States and its progeny Debs v. United States, which had something to do with imprisoning people and stripping their citizenship for expressing unpopular political opinions;

Herrera v. Collins, in which the Court held that executing prisoners whom post-trial evidence shows to be actually innocent of any crime is not a "cruel" or "unusual" punishment;

Bowers v. Hardwick, in which the Court held that it's constitutional to jail two consenting, unrelated adults for the physical act of love; and

Kelo v. City of New London, in which the Court held that government may seize valuable private property for the purpose of giving it away to government cronies who intend nothing more than to flush it down the toilet.

We're sure that with a few extra minutes, or even hours, we could find several dozen more. Perhaps our commenters will do so.

Nonetheless, congratulations to Ben Shapiro, for producing the most histrionic utterance, on the entire internet and from a Harvard man no less, concerning yesterday's events. And congratulations to commenter Beth Kingsley, who will no doubt spend the Fourth of July bellowing KHAAAAAAAN! along with Captain Kirk and her new blu-ray copy of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

We're pleased to announce that Mr. Shapiro has won a copy as well, and will be notifying him shortly as to how he may claim it.

UPDATE!

Popehat friend and commenter Jack B. has immeasurably improved "The Day Freedom Died" image. Feast your eyes on "The Day Freedom Died, and the Eagles Cried".

Last 5 posts by Patrick Non-White