The ink had not yet dried on my last column that discussed the fact that Barack Obama was woefully unprepared for the presidency and as a result is making deadly missteps in the execution of that role, when news broke of General Stanley McChrystal in essence saying the exact same thing to Rolling Stone magazine.  This isn't just a story to be brushed off.  This is a bombshell.

Don't be distracted by the media comically chastising the General for daring to speak out against "The One" (yes, the same media that hailed military officers who were willing to "speak truth to power" in criticizing George Bush).  That isn't the story. 

The true meaning of the McChrystal episode is titanic, because it is quite apparent the General was sending a stern message directly to the American people.

For more reasons than I can count, it is beyond obvious that McChrystal's public criticism of Obama was not a lapse in judgment or a mistake.  It was unquestionably intentional.  First, four-star generals have not achieved that rank without knowing the chain of command and the expectation of subordination to superiors.  Second, all of McChrystal's advisers were touting the same message, demonstrating this was no fluke, nor an offhand comment taken out of context.  Third, McChrystal spoke the inflammatory words to Rolling Stone, a well known anti-war, anti-military magazine.  Fourth, reports are that McChrystal actually saw the piece before it went to print and offered up no objections to its content.

If all that is true, then it naturally begs the question: why did he do it?

McChrystal is one of the lead authors of the "counterinsurgency" strategy that, despite the nay saying of liberals like then-Senators Obama and Biden, transformed Iraq from a quagmire into a success.  He knows the strategy works.  But as its architect, he also knows this new military policy requires two vital elements: lots of troops, and as much time as necessary for them to do their job.

While other factors are important (cultural bonds, regional partnerships, financial investment, troop morale, etc.), the two most crucial ingredients to making counterinsurgency work (in Afghanistan or anywhere) is a massive amount of troops on the ground to overwhelm the enemy and live among the people, and a commitment to stay as long as necessary to break the will of the enemy.

This is precisely why counterinsurgency worked in Iraq.  Over the ignorant objections of both Obama and Biden, then-President Bush listened to his military commanders and ordered the troop surge.  And while being pummeled by the media and Democrat political opportunists for not setting a hard deadline for withdrawal, Bush committed to stay in Iraq until the job was finished.  The result speaks for itself.

As the Afghan war began to deteriorate, Stanley McChrystal was put in charge to implement that effective strategy there.  But he quickly found that Barack Obama is no George W. Bush.  First, Obama - having championed himself as the anti-war candidate - cut the number of troops McChrystal requested.  And then, in what has to be one of the most foolish wartime moves in history, he announced an arbitrary date for the beginning of American troop withdrawal.

This may please the ex-hippies in the anti-war crowd that Obama courted during the campaign, but it has emboldened our enemy, imperiled our troops and created a giant mess of our counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan.

Having pressed his case privately with Obama's war team in Washington, McChrystal certainly saw the handwriting on the wall, and as a final recourse, pled his case to the American people.

Were his actions a breach of protocol?  Yes.  Did they rise to the level of insubordination?  Probably.  Was Obama justified in removing him from command?  I think so.  But after we're done hammering McChrystal for going over the President's head, we better give some serious thought as to why he was so willing to put his career on the line like that.

The reason is as clear as it is frightening: our political leadership in Washington is clueless.  And their incompetence is costing us not only resources and money, but most importantly the precious lives of brave American soldiers. 

General Stanley McChrystal was willing to lose his job to send that message to the only people who can do something about it.  He was talking to you.

To say I was dumbfounded would be an understatement.  About a week before the 2008 presidential election, I was talking to a friend who had just informed me he had decided to vote for Barack Obama.  "Why, given the most serious state of national and international affairs we were facing, would you be so willing to roll the dice on a political novice like Obama?" I asked.  His incredible response: "Sarah Palin." 

It was his concern that she was unprepared to be just a heartbeat away from the presidency, and if something were to happen to John McCain, she might be thrust into a role where inexperience can be deadly.  So his solution was to vote a man into that very office who had far less experience than even Palin.  Amazing.

I have often wondered if 18 months into the tenure of what is quite apparently the most woefully unprepared president the United States has ever known, my friend is among the ever-growing majority of Americans who regret the Obama gamble.

Domestically, we have seen Obama take the staggering deficit and debt he inherited and double down on it.  Even now, as studies show our debt preparing to overtake our Gross Domestic Product (a watershed moment that virtually guarantees an economic calamity on par with the meltdown occurring in Greece), rather than declaring a national economic emergency that requires deep cuts in government spending, President Obama is attempting to add billions more to his unsustainable budget.

We have witnessed the man whose primary constitutional responsibility is to carry out the laws of Congress utterly fail to enforce those laws regarding border security and immigration.  As a result of his flagrant dereliction of duty, Americans are being killed and individual border states like Arizona have had to assume the task of doing it themselves, only to be criticized by the negligent president himself.

Then, in dealing with the environmental disaster occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, our President has looked like a deer in the headlights.  He vacationed in the early days until media reports hammered him for not visiting the region.  So he visited, and then declared a moratorium on all off shore drilling, destroying thousands of American jobs.  Then when media reports suggested he wasn't being tough enough on those responsible, the President went on the Today show and cussed.  Impressive stuff.

Then came last week's bizarre Oval Office address.  Such speeches are historically reserved for wars, which is appropriate given that Obama announced the next front in his war on the American middle class.  Outlining nothing meaningful to the problem in the Gulf, the President called for a massive national energy tax that if enacted will increase the average family's cost of living by thousands of dollars per year, completely destroy the auto and manufacturing industries in our country, and send the economy into a tailspin from which it will never recover.

On the positive side, BP - the original architects of the energy tax Obama proposes - will benefit tremendously.

And yet if it's possible, the President has proven to be worse in the dangerous world of foreign affairs.  He has foolishly sided with thug communists like Castro, Chavez, and Ortega over the democratic demands of the Honduran people, stood shamefully silent while freedom-loving Iranian citizens were beaten to death in their streets, and has joined the jackals in condemning Israel's completely rational and legal right to defend itself from annihilation.  And despite promising how his departure from Bush's "go-it-alone" strategy would bring the world to our side, the record is unmistakable: Bush led the UN to unanimously condemn Iran's nuclear plans three times.  Obama's best effort failed to convince even two close allies.

We're learning the hard way: Barack Obama was spectacularly unprepared for this office.

Following that recent Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill, even President Obama's most ardent supporters seemed baffled at his incompetence.  MSNBC's tag team of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews could barely find words to explain how pathetic the president's speech was.  Olbermann stammered, "It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days.nothing specific was said at all."  And Matthews - the same man who just 19 months ago was getting thrills up his leg at the mere sound of Obama's voice - concluded, "No direction...I don't sense executive command."

The reason for that, Chris, is that there is none.  The man who now occupies the White House is overmatched, overwhelmed and overcome by the responsibilities of an office he was not equipped to assume.  An office that is now - much to the chagrin of an embarrassed nation - utterly dwarfing him.

In Federalist #2, Founder John Jay addressed the dangers of foreign force and influence.  In the course of the essay, he celebrated, "With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people ? a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs."  Jay understood that perhaps America's greatest protection against the threat of foreign manipulation was our overriding sense of unity as a people.

That's why Jay and the other Founders insisted that immigrants be willing to embrace and adopt our values and principles.  George Washington wrote, "By an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendents, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people."

Unfortunately, in the name of political correctness, we are trampling this very notion of unity in deference to the sacred cow of "diversity."  No clearer can this tragic reality be witnessed than in our developing societal embrace of Islam. 

Unlike other religions, Islam is simultaneously a religious and a political order.  It seeks a state-imposed caliphate...a theocratic regime that orders allegiance to Islamic law.  Those are the expectations of anyone who follows the Koran.

When Dr. Daniel Shayesteh (the former co-founder of the Islamic terror group Hezbollah) appeared on my radio program, I asked him whether true adherents to Islam could peacefully assimilate into American culture and embrace constitutional law and order.  He responded, "It is impossible for a person who follows Mohammed and says, ?I am a Muslim' and follows the instruction of the Koran to align himself with other laws and cultural values.  That's impossible, because everything other than Islamic culture and principle is evil."

That chilling admission should set off warning bells.  Yet, despite this plainly stated position, Americans continue to suffer the foolishness of political correctness that tells us we should celebrate the growth of Islam here in America.  Let me ask a hypothetical question: would you vote for someone who ran on the platform of obliterating U.S. sovereignty, discarding the U.S. Constitution, subjugating women and executing homosexuals and all non-adherents to an established national religion?

Of course not.  Then why do we consider it a feather in our cap as a people, and hail our virtuous diversity when practicing Muslims are elected to office?  Because either professing Muslims like Andre Carson (D-IN) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) - both of whom serve in Congress - believe in those aforementioned principles, or they are not true adherents to Islam.

Don't believe me?  Omar Ahmed, chairman of the supposedly moderate Council on American-Islamic Relations, reportedly told a group of California Muslims in 1998, "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran...should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth."

I know that addressing all this makes many people so uncomfortable that they choose not to pay attention.  Perhaps that stems from our fear of violence if we do (see Comedy Central's recent capitulation to "Revolution Muslim").  But more likely it comes from our mounting cultural indoctrination in political correctness - the same garbage that infected Europe decades ago.  What have been its fruits there?  Entire regions of many modern European countries are now completely under the authority of local Muslim leaders who ignore national laws and impose their own Sharia law instead. 

And here?  The American Academy of Pediatrics has recently taken the side of Muslims who seek to uphold their cultural practice of female genital mutilation.  Islam holds that women should not receive the same sexual pleasure that men do, and therefore many Muslims in the United States send their young daughters overseas to have those sensitive areas removed.  Rather than stand against this barbaric act, the AAP has begun advocating for the U.S. to change its laws to allow this practice to occur here legally.  We must be open-minded, you know.

And though the construction of Islamic mosques have historically been to signify dominance over conquered foes, the New York community board and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg are okaying plans to construct not one, but two mosques at the site of the World Trade Center attacks.  Another triumph for diversity!

This is a matter of self-preservation.  The more we loosen our grip on our Founders' insistence on assimilation and unity for those who make America their home, the quicker we hasten our march towards cultural oblivion...or the jihadists' paradise.

If you haven't been paying attention, a very interesting reality has been occurring on the American political left.  Long advocates of the need to keep religion and the church out of politics, leading liberals have begun singing a different tune recently.  We hear the President speaking about listening for "God's voice," Harry Reid lecturing on our "moral imperatives," and even Nancy Pelosi calling on church leaders to lobby their parishioners to support the left-wing approach to illegal immigration.

I actually consider this a major victory for conservative Christians who have been speaking about the inescapable intersection of faith and politics for years.  For the longest time, the left kept up a futile approach of pretending that faith doesn't matter in the sphere of public policy.  Yet, there was always an air of inconsistency in their tired contention that, "you can't legislate morality."  After all, every law that is written declares one thing to be right and another wrong...thus, it imposes someone's view of morality. 

So now, the left has apparently abandoned their incoherent strategy and adopted a new one.  Rather than seeking to eliminate Christian influence on politics, the left is now launching an aggressive campaign to rebrand Christianity to fit their liberal political agenda.

And perhaps no other figure is playing a more important role in that effort than self-proclaimed spiritual adviser to liberal politicians, Jim Wallis.  Wallis's past is one that includes membership in the radical "Students for a Democratic Society" during Vietnam, championing of communism in the 1970s, and the founding of an anti-capitalist magazine entitled, "The Post-American." 

In 1971, Wallis changed the name of his magazine to "Sojourners."  Though billed as a "progressive Christian commentary on faith, politics, and culture," it is readily apparent to regular readers like myself that it is heavy on the "progressive" and light on the "Christian."  For instance, a recent post on Wallis' Sojourner's blog - "God's politics" - blatantly lied about the Arizona immigration law, calling it "legal racial profiling."  The law itself outright forbids racial profiling at least four times.  Even more damaging, the magazine's website links to the outrageously vile and offensive left-wing hate site "Daily Kos" in its favorite blogs section, and recently featured the foul-mouthed Comedy Central host Jon Stewart as a "modern day prophet."

These anecdotal red flags, however, are not nearly as concerning as Wallis's own words and behavior.  Appearing recently on the left wing talk radio program, "The Stephanie Miller Show," Wallis condemned the "utterly partisan" political dialogue.  "That's why I like shows like yours," Wallis commented to Miller.  But wait...Stephanie Miller is the same woman who went on Larry King Live and called for the execution of Rush Limbaugh.  She also recently made the proclamation that "God is a Democrat."

Evidently that blatant hypocrisy was not enough for Wallis.  He then went on to condemn conservatives by reprimanding, "But, my goodness, you can't challenge people's...faith because they disagree with you on a policy option."  This just moments before Wallis told Miller he was, "pondering a blog for this week which will say, ?Is Libertarianism Christian?'"  In other words, because Wallis disagrees with libertarians on policy, he will question their faith.  Oh, but he wasn't done.  Asked by Miller about Kentucky Republican Rand Paul's position on the BP oil spill, Wallis replied, "I'd say that's un-Christian."

The truth is I have always struggled theologically with many of Wallis's positions.  While claiming to revere William Wilberforce (the man who single handedly made slavery illegal in England) as a Christian who did political engagement the right way, on the great moral issue of our day - abortion - Wallis believes it should be kept legal.  I've also scratched my head many times at Wallis's call for "social justice."  While I do believe that fighting poverty, being a good steward of creation, and charity are Christian imperatives, I recognize that those are commands Christ gave to us individually, to be motivated out of love and compassion.  Too often, it seems, Wallis seeks to use public policy, government confiscation, regulation and redistribution to achieve these objectives.  That's not compassion, it's compulsion.  His well-intentioned aims then bring glory to the state, not to God.

But those theological concerns are now giving way to something more serious, and those Christians who "sojourn" with Wallis should be very wary.  While our faith should always inform our politics, we should never let our politics inform our faith.  Recent examples show Wallis treading freely across that dangerous line.