Sick of the total BS of rampant PC?

This brazen, furiously funny book is the antidote to today's poison of political correctness. With humor and chutzpah, attorney, commentator, and popular radio host Michael Smerconish takes on today's oversensitive culture with a collection of entertaining, outlandish anecdotes about PC gone wild-stories that are hilarious, horrifying, and unbelievably true.

Why are sports leagues handing out trophies to losers? Why are little old grandmas hired to guard 200-pound prisoners? Why are newborn babies and old men with walkers singled out at the airport while likely terrorists are ushered through security with ease?

This book shows through these absurdities that today's atmosphere of censorship and multiculturalism is paving the way for serious threats to our cultural identity and national security: "It's one thing for the forces of political correctness to muzzle our day-to-day lives here at home in the US, quite another when that same cancer metastasizes into the war on terror."

We must eradicate the PC disease. Our sanity-and our very lives-depend on it.  

"Michael Smerconish talks the talk: If you say unpopular things, watch out! Using vivid examples of PC rubbish, Muzzled will lead you into a world that would terrify Rod Serling. An entertaining and provocative book."
-Bill O'Reilly

"Reads like fiction, too bad it's true."
-Nelson DeMille, novelist, author of Night Fall and The General's Daughter

"The PC virus is out of control . . . and it's worse than you think! In this entertaining and important book, Michael Smerconish chronicles just how mindless things have gotten in politically correct America. He tells fascinating stories that will make you laugh . . . right up until the time they make you scream. Thanks to the PC crowd, we are all living in The United States of the Absurd."
-Bernard Goldberg, journalist and author of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, Arrogance, and Bias

"I really squirm whenever I find myself agreeing with Smerconish. (I know the feeling is mutual.) I did a lot of squirming while reading this provocative book. All true liberals and conservatives must agree with Smerconish that the PC muzzles must be removed so that people can decide based on the marketplace of ideas."
-Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard and author of Preemption

"I don't often find myself on the same side of the political barricades as Michael Smerconish. But Muzzled is a witty, provocative, and timely book. Even when Michael is wrong, which is often, he draws you in and keeps you reading."
-Arianna Huffington, author of Pigs at the Trough and Fanatics and Fools

"In Muzzled, my American Blood Brother of status-quo-obliterating defiance, Michael Smerconish, once again smokes out the cockroaches of political correctness . . . Muzzled is a great title for a book that I am convinced every American school kid should read and be tested on. If a new generation doesn't grow some intellectual balls, our Once Great Nation will continue to repeat horrific mistakes and pay the price . . . Read it. Live it."
-Ted Nugent, rock star, author, television personality, and hunter extraordinaire

Muzzled

NELSON CURRENT

Contents

Introduction.................................................vii1. Photo Finish..............................................12. The Payback...............................................103. Sorry We Got It Correct...................................284. Dressing for Political Correctness........................355. Oh, Yes, It's Ladies' Night...............................416. It's All about Me.........................................457. God Bless Patrick Cubbage.................................498. Political Correctness in Full Bloom.......................569. Seeing Purple.............................................6010. Trophy Mania.............................................6711. Getting Maid on Campus...................................7312. Naked Tigers.............................................7713. A Behemoth of an Incident................................8114. Cops and Dancers.........................................9315. There She Isn't..........................................10516. Will the Real Rob Morris Please Rise.....................11317. It's All about the Wampum................................12518. Intelligently Designing a Curriculum.....................13619. I Wish I Were Joking.....................................14620. Stamps of Disapproval....................................15721. Can't We All Just Get Along?.............................16322. Up in Smoke..............................................17123. Mumidiots................................................18224. The Parade at PC and Main Streets........................19425. 24 and There's So Much More..............................20026. The T-Word, Shhhh!.......................................20627. Still Flying Blind.......................................21728. Is That All There Is?....................................234Epilogue: A Letter to My Son.................................246Acknowledgments..............................................250About the Author.............................................257Notes........................................................259Index........................................................285

Chapter One

I seem to be on everyone's e-mail list. No matter how hard I try to keep my own e-mail address obscure, I get a boatload of messages every day, not only from people I know, but also from total strangers. I'm not talking about those who communicate via my Web site (www.mastalk.com), which I set up to give my radio listeners and Daily News readers an avenue to reach me. I mean that I receive e-mail via an address which I attempt to keep secret. I'll bet it's happened to you, too.

Inevitably, people whom you want to have your e-mail address see something interesting they wish to circulate to a number of their friends or business associates. So they send it to you as one of a handful of individuals on their receipt list, and all of a sudden, individuals who are not connected, except by virtue of having one friend or acquaintance in common, see one another's e-mail address. It's the Internet version of the sixth degree of separation, except cyberspace puts us all at one degree of separation.

One positive thing about having my e-mail address exposed: it increases the joke flow. Take any serious news event or matter of less importance but still of public concern: the space shuttle, OJ, Clinton/Lewinsky, any presidential race, or Michael Jackson. Within minutes of serious reportage of such a happening, I receive someone's comedic interpretation of the item. (Thankfully, 9/11 was an exception.)

I've noticed, more often than not, when I scroll to the bottom of the e-mail message following the cyber trail to where it originated, I can decipher an e-mail address with some financial institution connection. It could be an investment-banking house or a stock brokerage. Try it. Next time something comes around, see if you can't do likewise.

Forget the Borscht Belt. Wall Street must be the funniest place on earth. My Internet experience tells me that the most rapidly crafted and most creative jokes seem to flow from that vicinity. I'm not saying the best jokes are written there. But those who work in the financial sector seem to get them first. And they share. I think I can further explain the phenomena.

Information is the lifeblood of Wall Street. Everything they do there is based on having good knowledge. The home to Masters of the Universe has a disproportionate share of Type-A personalities whose livelihood is dependent upon their staying a few steps ahead on matters of financial concern. Those market-related matters are tied to current events. So the movers and shakers on Wall Street make it their business to know what's going on all over the world, and that is why they have such keen insight and the best first impressions into world events.

The high-pressure environment in which they work is also an atmosphere that spawns some levity to prime the intellectual pump. (There've been a few recent incidents that have gotten out of control and portrayed a pinstriped frat house.) You put it all together and you have bright guys, in the loop, sharing a few laughs as they go about their work. I think it's a good thing.

But now I'm worried that this, like many other institutions of American life dealt with in these pages, is imperiled. And my cause for alarm is the case of Andrew Susser and Joel Krasner.

I've never met Andrew Susser, and the only picture I have seen of him is the one that got him fired. More about that in a moment. But from what I have read about him and gleaned from some who are close to him, this guy sounds like a real-life Sherman McCoy. The book version, not the way Tom Hanks played the Tom Wolfe-created visage of Wall Street.

Consider his bio. Susser graduated from prestigious Vassar College in 1986 with a BA in Economics. Maybe an indication of his independent thinking and willingness to challenge conventional norms was in evidence when he co-founded and was editor of the Vassar Spectator, an "alternative" campus newspaper.

After graduating from Vassar, Andrew Susser left Poughkeepsie and headed for Wall Street where he spent two years as a market analyst and institutional trading liaison at Merrill Lynch. After that, it was on to Philadelphia where he studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He was awarded two degrees: an MBA from Wharton and a JD from (my alma mater) Penn Law School. After Penn, he had a brief stint at the law firm of Shearman & Sterling, concentrating in the areas of corporate finance and mergers and acquisitions.

But Susser quickly grew tired of putting other people's deals together and decided to get in on the action himself. He landed at Moody's Investors Service where he cut his teeth in the Gaming and Theater sectors as a senior analyst. Andrew Susser then spent two years as a fixed-income Gaming and Lodging analyst at Salomon Brothers and finally landed at Banc of America Securities, LLC, an investment banking unit of Charlotte-based Bank of America Corp. which "delivers capital raising, financial advisory and risk management solutions, bulge-bracket trading and global distribution services, and objective research on global markets and growth sectors to corporations, institutional investors, financial institutions and government...