Paul Waldman at the Gadflyer has an article about Bush's continuous slamming of Massachusetts that I've been talking about offline for a long time, albeit much less eloquently. This overblown charge goes unanswered by both the media and the Kerry campaign.

My questions about this are many:

a) how does the media let Bush get away with this?
b) why doesn't the Kerry campaign say something?
c) can you imagine the firestorm if Kerry said the same thing about Texas?
d) why don't people in MA stand up and say something?

Seriously, where is the backbone of the people from Massachusetts? If California was getting slammed by the president the same way, people here would be up in arms. My personal feeling is that the country would be a hell of a lot better off if the more states were like MA (I'm talking to you, Kentucky), but that's besides the point.

The real point is not why the good people of the Bay State are not speaking up, but why Kerry and his campaign isn't saying anything. Waldman puts it succinctly.

John Kerry knows that if he criticized one state or one region of the country, the press and the Republicans would come down on him like a ton of bricks, charging him with being a Northeastern elitist who doesn't want to be the president of all Americans.

But the rules are different on the other side of the aisle. In today's politics, it is acceptable for Republicans to traffic in ugly stereotypes and assert outright that people who come from some areas of America are not really American. Some might remember the ad to which I referred, aired by the conservative Club for Growth, which said, "Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs."