On January 31, 2000, Baseball commissioner Bud Selig suspended--with pay--Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker until May 1st. Rocker committed the unpardonable sin of engaging in politically incorrect speech. Compare his 2½ month suspension with that of Lenny Randle, who, in 1977, got 30 days for punching his manager.

But what did Rocker actually say?

Explaining to a Sports Illustrated reporter why he would never want to be on a New York team (this itself is heresy), Rocker remarked that riding the subway to the ballpark was like riding through Beirut and you might have to sit "next to some queer with AIDS, or next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, or next to some mom with four kids."

Replace "queer" with some more acceptable word, and you have three entirely credible scenarios, as could be confirmed by any regular passenger of the New York City subway system.

He then added that you can walk down any block in Times Square, and not hear anybody speaking English, commenting, "I'm not a very big fan of foreigners. How the hell did they get in this country?"

Not a fashionable sentiment, to be sure, but one that is no doubt widely held.

I guess Selig feels that he can save baseball, already suffering from falling TV ratings and aging demographics, by playing the big PC enforcer. Only, Bud, don't ask the fans what they think. Too many of them would probably agree with John Rocker. And while you're at it, you'd better remove Ty Cobb from the Hall of Fame. After all, Cobb was a notorious racist and misogynist.

As a matter of fact, the Director's Guild of America (DGA) did something pretty close to that...

In November, 1999, the Guild unanimously voted to rename its D.W. Griffith award the Lifetime Achievement Award. The reason, of course, was Griffith's 1915 film, "The Birth of a Nation."

Even for Hollywood, ground zero of political correctness, removing Griffith's name was a stupefyingly ridiculous act.

Quite simply, Griffith is the father of the American cinema, and single-handedly created Hollywood. Besides "Nation," he made over 400 other films. It is bad enough that this miserable industry cared so little about its founder that it cast him out, watching him die a pauper; but defaming him in this manner just proves that no matter how bad Hollywood gets, it can still get worse.

If "Nation" is condemned as being too favorable to the Ku Klux Klan, it should be pointed out that everything portrayed in the pic really happened. The South got shafted during Reconstruction, there really were carpetbaggers and scalawags, and semi-literate former slaves were put into high office.

Perhaps we should remind our clueless DGA friends that President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, was impeached on trumped up charges because the Radical Republicans controlling Congress during Reconstruction felt that he was being too soft on the South. But Johnson was only carrying out Lincoln's programs. In fact, this writer is convinced that had Lincoln not been assassinated, he too would have been impeached--or at the very least threatened with impeachment--for the same reasons.

In the meantime, vicious hate speech on the other side gets a free pass.

In December, 1998, while a guest on Conan O'Brien's TV show, noted liberal intellectual Alec Baldwin was expressing his angst about the Clinton impeachment, and Henry Hyde:

"If we were in other countries, we would ... all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death! We would stone him to death!"

Baldwin wasn't done: "No, shut up! I'm not finished! We would ... go to their homes and we'd kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families!"

Baldwin later said that it was a joke. But try joking like that about any of our PC-protected groups, and see how far you get.

And then there's Harvard historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose 1996 best seller, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," included these gems:

The German is "generally brutal and murderous in the use of other peoples."

In the Soviet Gulags, the "cruelty of the guards did not even begin to approach that which the Germans inflicted on the Jews."

The German is a "member of an extraordinarily, lethal political culture."

The Germans are..."pathologically ill...struck with the illness of sadism... diseased, sadistic, psychopathic... in thrall of absolutely fantastical...beliefs that ordinarily only madmen have..."

It must be said that Goldhagen's worthless tome was savagely criticized by Jewish historians Ruth Birn and Norman Finkelstein, among others. Yet, it is regarded as scholarly enough to be on college course reading lists all over the country. Naturally, it received huge praise at essentially all of the elite media outlets.

Only under an atmosphere of full PC can a virulent and fraudulently conceived screed proclaiming hatred for the entire German race be promulgated in the name of human rights.

But, a young relief pitcher for the Braves must be punished--harshly.