Classless: Chris Wallace asks Michelle Bachmann, “Are you a flake?”

Funny, I don’t recall him ever asking Obama that at all.

The Video:

Me and Ed Morrissey are on the same wavelength here:

I can understand why Chris Wallace asked this question. Given his guest’s propensity for gaffes, such as picking the name of a dead hero as a live Medal of Honor winner, botching a toast to Queen Elizabeth II, discussing the high points of the Austrian language, and several references to a military medic as a “corpseman,” it might be hard to take the person seriously.

Oh, wait — Wallace wasn’t interviewing Barack Obama after all…

[…]

Jim Hoft calls this “awful,” but it’s just the same old double standard applied to Republicans. We have yet to hear any serious coverage from the national media of Obama’s hundreds of gaffes while in the White House, just as we heard little of his “57 or 58 states” remark and other gaffes on the campaign trail, such as the six-month string that produced these doozies:

Did any of the national media ask Barack Obama in the summer of 2008 if he was a “flake”? Bachmann has not been without her gaffes, although she has improved her media interactions substantially since the “anti-American” comment in November 2008. But given Obama’s track record both before and after his election to the presidency, it would take a superhuman effort to vault into his league. And the media still mainly ignores Obama’s gaffes, which have grown into the hundreds, without a single outlet ever asking Obama if he is a “flake” on that same basis.

It could be that Wallace was giving Bachmann an opening to push back against the “flake” meme, but the fact that Bachmann’s having to respond to this rather than the gaffemaster in the White House is the real problem.

I hated to have to quote that whole thing; but I believe Ed is absolutely correct. Now, for the record, Wallace apologized, and there is video of that; However, I do not believe it is enough to say that he is sorry. I believe Chris Wallace should be removed from Fox News Sunday and someone else be put in his place. Asking questions like this, is unacceptable in professional journalism. Because quite frankly, it shows a sexist bias on Wallace’s part; and Fox News should not be allowed to get away with that sort of nonsense. Ed Schultz did not get away with it, when he called Laura Ingraham a right wing slut; and neither should Wallace.

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