"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
The Right To Be A Jerk
And there is a whole string of cases in which the courts have found that people who said things much worse to police officers than Cox did had a First Amendment right to do so. In one, Ford v. City of Newport News, the accused "was so loud and boisterous that apartment dwellers in a nearby building came out on their porch and asked if the officers needed help." Yet the court found no basis for a disorderly-conduct charge.
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