ALEX GRISWOLD: To All Those New York City Journalists Horrified By Cruz’s Jab: Get Over Yourselves.

The notion that it’s somehow outrageous to say New York has different values than the rest of the country is, to put it bluntly, stupid. No less than the public editor of The New York Times recognized this fact a decade ago, when Daniel Okrent said in a column that “of course” the paper had a liberal bias. He argued that the bias didn’t derive from any vast left wing conspiracy or intentional malice. Instead, he noted that the paper’s editors, reporters, and columnists were all New Yorkers, and they simply have a different “value system” than the rest of the country. . . .

Countless polls have proven the truth of his and Cruz’s words. Generally speaking, New Yorkers’ political and cultural views– read: their “values”– do not resemble those of America at large. That’s not a good or bad thing (the same could be said of Liberty University), it’s just a fact.

But New York Governor Andrew Cuomo disagreed, saying to a receptive audience on MSNBC and CNN this morning that Cruz’s statement was “anti-American” and offensive to gays and women(?). . . .

But where did Cruz get the idea that “New York values” are incompatible with the more conservative values that prevail in the heartland? How about from Cuomo himself:

Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and if they are the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

So even after being told by the freaking Governor of New York himself that conservatives aren’t welcome, it’s somehow below the belt to say they have different values.

What Okrent described a decade ago goes beyond just The New York Times. Every single person living in what New Yorkers sneeringly call “flyover country” has to deal with nonstop jokes, jabs, and attacks from the East Coast-based media that their way of life, their hobbies, their faith, their politics, and everything about them is backwards, oppressive, anti-woman, anti-gay, contrary to real American values, and just plain uncultured. From Family Guy to the nightly news to Girls to NPR to Glee to Jon Stewart, every Middle American has been told a thousand times how they are nothing but a dumb hick or a pathetic repressed suburbanite.

It’s funny what sniveling wimps New York journalists are when the tables are, however mildly, turned.

UPDATE: Cruz apologizes. Well, sort of. Okay, not really at all.