Really, it comes down to what you mean by &quot;America&quot;; my understanding of the &quot;[president] is destroying America&quot; crowd is that they&#x27;re commenting more on destroying America&#x27;s &quot;America-ness&quot; than actually dismantling the nation.<p>Right now, on the right, you have people making claims that Obama is a closet authoritarian bent on dismantling the constitution, taking away our guns, and forcing your small town to not have a nativity scene afront their courthouse this year.  Turning back the clock by a decade, those sorts of claims are not very far off from the claims of people (like a rather-younger me) on the left that Bush (or, perhaps, Cheney) were intentionally using the September 11th attacks as a tool for stripping us of our constitutional freedoms.  Although obviously not a majority opinion; those sorts of views were definitely not uncommon during the Bush era.