To be clear, I wouldn’t vote for Michelle Bachmann if she were the only candidate in the 2012 presidential race. I’m not pleased with the Tea Party. They have a single approach to economics that doesn’t take into consideration the environment it is to be applied in. There are other issues that I believe are important that the Tea Party leaves out so they can get consensus on their misguided economic policy. And, they misunderstand Ronald Reagan and his economic approach. I’m not sure I can forgive them for the last one. Are we clear? Good.

That said, I was kind of surprised when I read “Leap of Faith” by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker the other day. It paints Bachmann and her beliefs in the worst possible way. But when Lizza got to Francis Schaeffer, I knew for sure that there was a six week dead chipmunk in the middle of the article. Don’t bother reading it, it is far too long at 8,300 words and if the length doesn’t get you, you’ll surely get motion sick from the heavy amount of spin and the out and out distortions are similar to those mirrors that make you look tall and skinny or short and round. Yes, it is that cheap of a carnival ride.

I was very happy to see someone take Lizza to task for his distortions of Schaeffer. Joe Carter at First Things points out the nature of the distortions without subjecting us to each and every one. Here’s a clever way Carter clues us in to the hatchet job:

Did you know that in a speech about her family moving to Iowa in 1857 she confused a plague of grasshoppers with a plague of locusts? Yes, you and I know that locusts are grasshoppers; Lizza and the New Yorker fact checkers probably do too. But if you put the words in scare quotes and imply that they are different you can give the impression that Bachmann somehow made a mistake.

From there Carter gets into the glaring errors Lizza and The New Yorker made when it comes to presenting what Schaeffer taught and believed. Carter finishes by schooling them with four lessons on journalism. I hope someone important at The New Yorker read them and took them to heart.

I’m not going to touch the Newsweek hatchet job so don’t ask. There was a time when Newsweek was a fairly reputable news outlet but in the past few years they’ve traded journalistic integrity for sensationalism. It is almost as if they’re adopting a National Inquirer approach in order to remain in print. It has gotten so bad that NOW defended Bachmann for the cover photo Newsweek chose of her.