For reasons no one seems able to explain, the right's criticism of health care reform legislation tends to drift toward matters of counting. First they complained that the bill(s) had too many pages, falsely claiming that Tolstoy's epic War and Peace boasts a lighter page count, as if this is indicative of anything other than an irrational prejudice against long books. Now, RedState.com has decided to sharpen their criticism by counting the words in the Senate health care bill -- not all the words, mind you, just arbitrarily selected words that offer “an interesting study in word choices that tell you all you need to know about the bill.”

In one column they listed what I assume are the scary-liberal-socialist words, like “shall” and “provide” and “tax.” In a second column are the freedom-liberty-Constitution words, like... well, “freedom,” “liberty,” and “Constitution.” Without ever explaining what the point of their little exercise is, RedState shows that the scary-liberal-socialist words appear with much greater frequency than the freedom-liberty-Constitution words.

Well, two can play at this incredibly stupid game. I took RedState's two lists of words and checked* to see how frequently they appear in the twenty-or-so pages of the Constitution. The results are damning:

Scary-liberal-socialist words Freedom-liberty-Constitution words

Shall or Shall Not: 337

Provide: 20

May: 42

Require: 6

Authority: 8

Tax: 12

Enforce: 9

Government: 9

Qualify: 1

Apply: 1

Rule: 1

Certify: 2

Law: 53

Authorize: 2

Reasonable: 1

Freedom: 2

Free: 3

Liberty: 3

Choice: 8

Choose or “Chuse”: 11

Own: 1

Constitution: 29 (not entirely fair)

Federalism: 0

If the raw numbers themselves aren't shocking enough, consider this: by RedState's count, the words “Shall” or “Shall Not” appear 3607 times in the 2074 pages of the health care bill, meaning they appear 1.74 times per page. Those same words appear 337 times in the 20 pages of the Constitution, for an average of 16.85 appearances per page.

The evidence is clear: the Constitution of the United States is at least 10 times as socialist and tyrannical as the Senate health care bill. Thank you, RedState, for helping us to expose this founding document as the commie, Marxist, rag that it is.

*My “methodology” consisted of copying and pasting the Constitution into a Word document and using Find-and-Replace to count the instances of each term. It's admittedly crude, but conducting a thoroughly scientific analysis of the words in the Constitution for the purposes of smacking down RedState's on-its-face-stupid premise would be like using a bazooka to kill a mosquito.