Hickory Mayor Wants to Censor Speech

Hickory Mayor Rudy Wright said at a Hickory City Council meeting last night that he's sick and tired of obscenity, and he wants the town attorney to research the most restrictive laws nationally on what a town can censor. What set off Wright was seeing a young man wearing a black T-shirt with a four-letter word in white lettering. It was "the one unspeakable word," Wright said, without elaborating. (Probably it wasn't "FOXX," though that's the first unspeakable word we thought of.) Then the mayor said (and I swear we're not making this up), "I've never seen that, and I've been to places a lot bigger than Hickory."

If he'd been in Washington, D.C., at the right time he could have heard his Vice President use a notorious four-letter word (not "FOXX") in public as part of a suggestion made to Sen. Leahy.

But in case anyone might think Wright something of a prude, he hurriedly clarified his position (and, again, we're not making this up): "I'll tell a dirty joke in a heartbeat."

Did you hear the one about the Hickory mayor who planned to ban dirty words from his city?