Burning up the internets this morning, Chris Wallace asking Michele Bachmann, “Are you a flake?”

Bachmann calls the question “insulting,” she’s “a serious person.” Wallace apologized but Bachmann’s apparently not accepting.

This following on the heels of the week-long aftermath of Wallace’s Jon Stewart interview. In that interview Stewart said that Wallace stands out among Fox News journalists for his seriousness. I think not. While he may not reflect the full overt balanced-bias of some of the others, the Bachmann interview shows he has many of the same faults Stewart criticized as “sensationalist and somewhat lazy.”

Conor Friedersdorf on how Wallace bungled the Bachmann interview:

For starters, he could’ve refined his terminology. Making “questionable statements” is unnecessarily vague. The problem with some of Bachmann’s statements is that they are factually inaccurate, intemperate, or both.  And a flake is someone who commits to something but doesn’t follow through. That isn’t the knock against Bachmann. Her critics think that she’s a right-wing nut job. Or else that she plays one on television to pander to the Tea Party base. Then there’s the first example Wallace chose. Bachmann’s remark about civilian casualties in Libya is the sort of forgivable misstatement people make all the time during off-the-cuff interviews.

And he knows it.

His other example — the time Bachmann suggested that the media should launch an investigation into anti-Americans in Congress — does exemplify some of Bachmann’s flaws. Alas, she isn’t forced to explain herself, because Wallace, having ended the question with “are you a flake,” thinks it’s a “strong answer” when Bachmann replies that she is an accomplished attorney. An appropriate followup would’ve been, “So why did you imply that your colleagues are anti-American?”

Meanwhile, James Fallows’ takes away from Bachmann’s Face The Nation appearance two signs that she’s serious: She looks much better than she used to and she is an absolute genius at the established political technique of giving the answer you want to give, no matter what the question was:

When I say these are signs that she is serious, I don’t mean that by my lights she suddenly has practical, plausible answers to the nation’s problems. It means that her run could be more disciplined and professional than some other ill-starred long-shot campaigns we’ve seen recently.

Demonstrating a different side of Fallows’ second point, Outside the Beltway’s Doug Mataconis notices that if you listened to Bachmann in that interview, you’d think that she believed that same-sex marriage is an issue that should be left to the states:

BACHMANN: In New York state, they have passed the law at the state legislative level and, under the 10th amendment, the states have the right to set the laws that they want to set.

WALLACE: So even though you oppose it, then its ok from — your point of view — for New York to say that same-sex marriage is legal.

BACHMANN: That is up to the people of New York. I think that it’s best to allow the people to decide on this issue. I think it’s best if there is an amendment that goes on the ballot, where people can weigh in. […]

WALLACE: But you would agree, if its passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor then that’s the state’s position.

BACHMANN: It’s state law. And the 10th amendmet reserves to the states that right.

Minutes later she told the truth.