In a February 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed, conservative radio host Michael Medved criticized Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh for their “distasteful charges” that President Obama is, in Palin's words, “purposefully weakening America.” Medved further wrote that Obama's “most paranoid critics” label him “as the political equivalent of a suicide bomber: so overcome with hatred (or 'rage') that he's perfectly willing to blow himself up in order to inflict casualties on a society he loathes.”

From Medved's op-ed, titled, “Obama Isn't Trying to 'Weaken America'”:

This history makes some of the current charges about Barack Obama especially distasteful--and destructive to the conservative cause.

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These attitudes thrive well beyond the blogosphere and the right-wing fringe. On Jan. 7, Sarah Palin spoke briefly on Laura Ingraham's radio show, saying, “What I believe that Obama is doing right now--he is hell-bent on weakening America.” While acknowledging that “it's gonna get some people all wee-weed up again,” she repeated and amplified her charge that “what Obama is doing” is “purposefully weakening America--because he understood that debt weakened America, domestically and internationally, and yet now he supports increasing debt.”

The assumption that the president intends to harm or destroy the nation that elected him has become so widespread that the chief advertising pitch for Dinesh D'Souza's best-selling book, “The Roots of Obama's Rage,” promises to “reveal Obama for who he really is: a man driven by the anti-colonial ideology of his father and the first American president to actually seek to reduce America's strength, influence and standard of living.”

None of the attacks on Mr. Obama's intentions offers an even vaguely plausible explanation of how the evil genius, once he has ruined our “strength, influence and standard of living,” hopes to get himself re-elected. In a sense, the president's most paranoid critics pay him a perverse compliment in maintaining that his idealism burns with such pure, all-consuming heat that he remains blissfully unconcerned with minor matters like his electoral future. They label Mr. Obama as the political equivalent of a suicide bomber: so overcome with hatred (or “rage”) that he's perfectly willing to blow himself up in order to inflict casualties on a society he loathes.

On his radio show last July 2, the most influential conservative commentator of them all reaffirmed his frequent charge that the president seeks economic suffering “on purpose.” Rush Limbaugh explained: “I think we face something we've never faced before in the country--and that is, we're now governed by people who do not like the country.” In his view, this hostility to the United States relates to a grudge connected to Mr. Obama's black identity. “There's no question that payback is what this administration is all about, presiding over the decline of the United States of America, and doing so happily.”