https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/09/28/how-far-reaching-is-two-trump-appointed-judges-ruling-against-him/

An appellate court’s stinging rebuke of a District Judge and the former president’s claims raises important questions about the state of the judiciary.

In a swift and stinging ruling, the 11th Circuit Federal Appellate Court in Florida restored reason to a legal process that had spiralled wildly out of bounds. In its ruling, siding with the US Department of Justice on approximately 100 classified documents seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from Donald Trump’s Florida hotel on August 8, the court allowed the government to once again access its own documents.

But the main reason the decision is significant is that two of the three judges who issued the rebuke of Federal District Court Judge Aileen Cannon were appointed by Mr Trump. He has frequently railed against judges who ruled against him, memorably denouncing one as “a Mexican” (he is from Indiana). And, along with Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, he concentrated on filling the benches with highly ideological Republicans.

The impact on the Supreme Court has been most evident, not just in the ruling overturning the 50-year-old individual right to an early-term abortion, but numerous other dramatic rulings. This led to the fear that not only had he managed to pack the courts with right-wing ideologues, but that he had immunised himself from legal accountability.

Judge Cannon was one of the former president’s last appointees, rammed through in his final week. Her ruling was a mishmash of pretzel logic and factual inaccuracy, and was derided from all parts of the legal spectrum. It therefore strongly reinforced those concerns.

However, the rebuff by this conservative appellate court is not only appropriately contemptuous, it also raises a series of crucial questions about the impact and future of the Trump-inflected judiciary.

The ruling begins with a straightforward recitation of the facts and the parties’ claims. Halfway into the text, though, it unleashes an utter demolition of Ms Cannon’s legal and factual mistakes. The most important of these is that, in the legally binding four-part test that everyone agrees must determine her decision, she had to find that the government displayed a “callous disregard” for Mr Trump’s constitutional rights.

But, as the ruling notes, not only did Mr Trump not show that, he also didn’t even really claim it. The rest of the decision makes for entertaining and, one hopes for Ms Cannon, instructive, reading, but it really isn’t necessary. Without showing such “callous disregard”, his case, and her ruling, collapse.

And that has profound implications for the rest of the case, because if the government didn’t act with a callous disregard for his rights regarding the classified documents, how could it have done so regarding the other documents? The rest of the script writes itself.

What’s more important is that a conservative and Trump-appointed majority court was not willing to reflexively side with him, and that it unanimously ruled, in 24 hours no less, against a lower court judge who was willing to do that, and in the process made Ms Cannon look ridiculous.

This is all good news but it’s hard to know how far it might go.

Clearly there are still limits, and Ms Cannon’s ruling was so indefensible that no appellate court was likely to fail to overturn it. Would they have been inclined towards a corrupt bias in a closer case? This is a conservative court, and it clearly has that bias. But would it have been willing to side with Mr Trump personally out of a misjudged sense of loyalty? That seems implausible.

Arguably the Supreme Court is the most conservative appellate court in the country today. Its ideological bias has been made clear in a series of shocking rulings that shred precedent and follow no real methodology other than right-wing, and especially religious, ideology.

That bias is also well-established. But would the high court’s five-vote right-wing majority, three of whom were appointed by Mr Trump, be inclined to personally protect the former president? We don’t know, but there’s every reason to suspect we’ll find out. There are at least five ongoing investigations that could result in indictments against Mr Trump, and he is likely to fight not merely being put on trial but even being investigated, every inch of the way.

The crux of the Florida case are his claims that the FBI, despite a lawful court order authorising the search, had no right to take the government records he had removed from the White House, refused to give back despite a grand jury subpoena, and which his attorneys falsely attested he did not possess, because they may somehow belong to him and because he retains a degree of “executive privilege” even after leaving office.

Executive privilege is a legal notion that dates to the Watergate era and is presumed to protect confidential conversations between a president and his or her staff to promote frank policy advice. But this still poorly defined privilege does not apply to any form of criminal conspiracy or unlawful conversation. And it belongs to the executive, meaning the sitting president.

Some jurists, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, have suggested that former presidents might retain aspects of executive privilege. But it’s very hard to imagine how the executive branch could enjoy a confidentiality privilege against itself. At any rate, none of that would provide protection from investigations into criminal activities, including crimes involving the removal, retention and concealment of government documents.

Mr Trump and his supporters keep insisting that he somehow declassified the classified documents in question. There’s no evidence of that and his attorneys have not made these claims in court, where there are serious penalties for lying. But, as the appellate court points out, it doesn’t matter. None of the crimes the FBI was investigating when it searched his hotel and discovered the trove of government documents hinge on classification.

The only thing the classification markings prove is that those documents don’t belong to him or include communications with his personal attorneys. And now they are back in the hands of the FBI, which is trying to discover why Mr Trump took them, refused to give them back, apparently lied about having them, and was so keen on keeping them. That’s all very important, but legally the motivation is irrelevant. Intentionally doing any of that is a felony, including for a former president. And it’s getting very close to landing this one in the dock.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-21/iran-claims-bahrain-to-shake-up-nuclear-talks-and-rebuff-israel?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

As with Russia and Ukraine or China and Taiwan, Tehran’s insistence that the island nation is a lost province is a red flag for US interests.

While the world’s attention toward Iran has focused on the failing nuclear talks, Tehran has been ramping up a renewed territorial claim that threatens serious long-term instability in the Persian Gulf. In recent weeks, the tightly controlled Iranian media have been reviving long-dormant claims that Bahrain, a key US ally, is the “14th province” of Iran, known as Mishmahig.

Irredentist grievances along these lines drive countless conflicts, but it’s particularly alarming that Tehran is suddenly reviving this one, which comes on top of a renewed dispute with the United Arab Emirates over three small Gulf Islands currently held by Iran. Bahrain is vital to American interests: It hosts the US Fifth Fleet and the 34-nation Combined Maritime Forces coalition, which pursues missions in antipiracy, maritime security and counterterrorism.

History shows Iran’s demand is baseless. In November 1957, under the shah, Iran formally laid claim to the island, a British protectorate since 1861. Tehran declared it a province and awarded it two parliamentary seats (which were never claimed). However, after heavy British and US pressure and a United Nations survey showing overwhelming public support in Bahrain for independence, in 1971 Iran recognized the island nation as a sovereign state.

Yet ever since, Bahrainis have often felt under a suspended Persian death sentence. After the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran sought to export its ideology into the Arab world, particularly countries with large Shiite populations like Bahrain. For the most part, Iranian meddling was not aimed at restoring direct rule, but at supporting Shiite efforts to gain more power, creating a pro-Iranian government in the capital, Manama, and perhaps overthrowing the Sunni ruling family. A failed Iranian-backed coup attempt in 1981 was followed by periods of warmer and cooler relations. 

Tensions have been rising between the two nations since 2016, when Bahrain joined other Gulf Arab countries in suspending diplomatic ties with Iran after mob attacks against Saudi diplomatic facilities. That year, Bahrain revoked the citizenship of Shiite cleric and opposition leader Isa Qassim, prompting threats of vengeance from Iran. (In 2018, Qassim was allowed to travel to London for medical treatment and now lives in Iran.)

Things intensified in 2020, when Bahrain followed the UAE in normalizing relations with Israel. This year, Israel supplied early warning radar systems to both countries, and a uniformed Israeli officer was deployed to the naval security consortium in Manama, drawing more Iranian ire.

In August, Iran’s media commemorated Bahrain’s 51st Independence Day with an explosion of rage against the country’s autonomy and the regime of the deposed shah for having recognized it. The government-run media have repeatedly broadcast a film called “A Separation,” reiterating these grievances. On Sept. 8, the Fars News Agency of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps republished a notorious 2007 editorial from the Kayhan newspaper that outlined Iran’s claim on the islands, which was backed up by the Foreign Ministry spokesman.

It’s no coincidence Iran is just now ramping up these specious claims, formally resolved half a century ago. Teheran’s belligerence raises the stakes surrounding the nuclear talks by threatening greater regional instability. It’s also clearly a response Bahrain’s developing closer ties with Israel. But that’s a self-fulfilling concern for Iran.

Once the UAE took the plunge of normalization with Israel two years ago, following suit was a no-brainer for Bahrain. Unlike the other Abraham Accords states, including Sudan and Morocco, Bahrain didn’t have any demands for Washington before signing on. Making common cause with the country doing the military heavy lifting against Iran’s activities and its network of militia groups in countries like Syria and Iraq was sufficient impetus. Iran’s renewed claims on Bahrain will only reinforce the view in Manama that normalizing with Israel was a good idea.

Just like Ukraine, Bahrain is a sovereign member state of the UN. This gives the US a moral imperative, in addition to national interest considerations, in explicitly rebuffing Iran’s claims. Washington and its allies, especially the other Gulf Arab countries, should make it clear that Persian ambitions in Bahrain won’t get any further in the 21st century than they did in the 20th.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/09/19/the-us-primaries-underlined-a-disturbing-american-reality/

Democrats stuck tenaciously to the center but Republicans grew even more extreme in recent primaries.

Last week, the US party primaries ended, setting up the crucial November midterm elections. The Democratic and Republican parties are profoundly divided, but while the Republican Party continues to charge towards the extreme right, with rare exceptions Democrats are tenaciously sticking to the moderate centre embodied by President Joe Biden – at least for now.

American “polarisation” is not yet between left-and right-wing coalitions, each becoming increasingly radical, though that could eventually develop. To the contrary, in November US voters will be largely faced with choices between relatively restrained centre-left Democratic candidates and a Republican Party that is becoming further radicalised.

During the Donald Trump presidency, many wondered if the Republican Party would return to less extreme and personality-driven politics once he was out of office, and if his style of high-octane demagoguery could transfer successfully to other candidates. The answers, at least within the party itself, are now clear. The party base is becoming more radical, and Mr Trump’s style of politics has proven all-but-essential for would-be Republican officeholders. Many of these politicians may not be fanatics privately, yet they are following their own voters down highly alarming rabbit holes.

But what was unanticipated until the aftermath of the 2020 election was that the Republican Party would be seized by a highly disturbing form of mass psychosis. Judging by opinion polls and the primary outcomes, most Republican voters believe in, and successful candidates repeat, the false idea that the 2020 election was fraudulent and somehow “stolen” from Mr Trump by Mr Biden.

There is no evidence whatsoever to support such claims, which were tossed out in over 60 failed lawsuits. There is no coherent or consistent – let alone plausible – narrative about how such fraud was committed. There is no explanation for how it was possible to rig an election simultaneously in hundreds of districts with different systems, but only for Mr Biden and not the many successful Republican candidates other than Mr Trump when they were all on the same hundreds of completely different district ballots.

There is also no explanation for why Democrats rigged the presidential election but did not bother to give themselves a majority in the Senate or more than a razor-thin margin in the House of Representatives.

Yet the article of faith that the 2020 election was “stolen” – a thoroughly irrational dogma that is objectively, verifiably, and obviously, false – is now the defining centrepiece of Republican politics and was the driving force in Republican primaries this year.

One of the two parties in the two-party American system is, therefore, firmly in the grip of a collective delusion and a form of mass psychosis. It would be preferable not to have to use such dramatic language, but it is not hyperbole at all. It is simply accurate.

Meanwhile, while Democrats are campaigning on familiar liberal themes about increased social spending, especially on children, protecting abortion rights and marriage equality, raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, empowering unions, and so on. Their winning candidates generally shied away from hot button culture war issues such as “defunding the police,” “abolishing the immigration enforcement services,” or an expansive “Green New Deal”.

It is particularly alarming that Republican voters in many states have nominated scores of election deniers for state and local roles that supervise elections, count votes and certify results. One key ringleader of this campaign is Steve Bannon, who, appropriately enough, was recently indicted in New York State for allegedly defrauding contributors to a “build the wall” scam, although Mr Trump pardoned him on federal charges arising from the same acts.

No Republican officials, up to and including former Vice President Mike Pence, suppressed accurate results or otherwise cheated on behalf of Mr Trump, in 2020. So the goal now is to put in place a small army of Trump acolytes ready to do just that after the next presidential election.

Fifteen Republican nominees for state governor, 11 for secretary of state (which usually oversee elections), and 10 for attorney general are avowed election deniers, and appear prepared to suppress democratic outcomes. Many, like Mr Trump, are also still hawking the preposterous QAnon conspiracy theory.

Worse still, North Carolina Republicans are asking the Supreme Court to codify into constitutional law a once-fringe  theory that elected state legislatures alone control all election-related decisions, independent even from court review, which could allow state legislatures to effectively cheat the voters within the bounds of a reinterpreted Constitution.

It is therefore vital that the federal Justice Department and Georgia prosecutors are both conducting extensive criminal investigations into plots to overthrow the 2020 election.

Last week, the Justice Department issued an astonishing 40 subpoenas for a huge array of former Trump aides and officials. They are not only looking into the January 6 assault on Congress, but also plots to submit slates of false electors purporting to represent Trump wins in states in which Mr Biden’s victory had already been certified.

Mobile phones belonging to Mr Trump’s aides Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman were seized by the FBI pursuant to the scheme, which another of his attorneys, Jack Wilenchik, accurately described as involving “fake electors”. The FBI also confiscated the phone of pillow salesman and notorious conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, for reasons that remain murky.

It is now unmistakable that the Department of Justice is investigating a huge range of current and former Trump aides pursuant to a wide variety of alleged conspiracies and other major potential felonies. That is in addition to the ongoing probe into why Mr Trump unlawfully removed thousands of government documents, many highly classified, to his Florida hotel, and refused to return them even after they were subpoenaed by a grand jury, with his attorneys formally but falsely attesting that he did not possess them.

Whether or not it is intentional, there is a direct correlation between efforts to install 2020 election-deniers in key election-related positions in states throughout the country and counter-efforts by the Justice Department that should make the potential consequences of such actions crystal clear through these expansive investigations, subsequent prosecutions, and, hopefully, instructive convictions and exemplary sentencings.

Even if anti-democracy candidates win key state-level posts in November, presumably they will be on notice long before they might try to subvert, reject, or tamper with the outcome of the presidential election in 2024: conspiracy to defraud the United States and similar major felonies can lead directly to prison. The reality of an awaiting cell ought to prove more powerful than the most beguiling, paranoid or cynica,l political mirage.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/09/13/the-pervasiveness-of-cancel-culture-is-a-scourge-on-america/

Complaints about “cancel culture” are the strongest signal of upcoming ideological censorship.

For the first time since the 1950s, ideologically motivated censorship is becoming a widespread crisis in the United States. On the left, such repression is either informal “cancellation” by online outrage mobs or carried out by universities or private companies. On the right, state censorship is now being enforced by law, including civil, and increasingly even criminal, penalties.

It is especially ironic, then, that one of the clearest signs an outburst of censorship is about to be unleashed is a loud and angry complaint about the lack of freedom of speech, particularly denunciations of “cancel culture”. With the most passionate and enraged outbursts, Americans can reliably set their watches and count the seconds before a demand for tolerance suddenly morphs into a platform for thoroughgoing intolerance of divergent views.

Recently I had a fascinating encounter with this phenomenon and it is unfortunately anything but unusual. Indeed, it is typical of the growing inability of many Americans to tolerate differences of opinion, even as they see themselves as champions of intellectual freedom.

In early August, I was surprised to be asked to contribute an essay to an obscure online journal on the subject of “Palestinianism”. I consulted the website and discovered it was a hyper-chauvinistic, indeed racist, Jewish publication deeply hostile to the Palestinians, as the proposed subject matter suggests.

Yet I agreed to write the essay, without compensation, for several reasons. I could reach an audience that I would otherwise never be able to address and perhaps make some think twice about their bigotry. They agreed to my title, “There’s no such thing as Palestinianism,” and made no objection to my insistence that they edit only for style and not content. And finally, their website said the raison d’etre for the publication was that they are passionately opposed to “cancel culture” and seek to ensure that everyone, left and right, and especially a moderate centre, get an equal say.

I naively forged ahead, imagining that they had reached out to me to provide a challenging alternative perspective, consistent with their supposed ethos of openness and fairness. So, I delivered 3,500 words on a mutually agreed-upon topic and was effusively thanked for “an exceedingly intelligent and well-written piece”. Yet, two hours later I was astounded to be informed that “we have elected not to publish your piece”. Naturally I asked for an explanation, but never received any response.

What happened, alas, is no mystery. They found my essay intolerable, because itexplained that the nonexistent ideology of “Palestinianism” is a crude rhetorical tool to dismiss the reality of the Palestinian people and suggest that their identity is a nefarious anti-Semitic plot – much in the same way as a good deal of “anti-Zionism” boils down to an attempt to negate the reality or validity of Israel or Israeli identity.

The minute I encountered a denunciation of “cancel culture” on their website, rather than taking it as a sign that they might be reaching out to me for alternative viewpoints that could enrich their publication with diversity, I should have known that under no circumstances would they publish anything I had to say on this topic. The complaint about pervasive censorship was the clearest possible sign that they were about to engage in censorship themselves, even more than the pervasive racism against Palestinians already festooning their website.

American censorship is indeed an epidemic. A new Florida law is so restrictive that teachers could be criminally liable for talking about their non-traditional families to their own elementary school children. An award-winning student newspaper and the whole journalism program have been shut down in a Nebraska public high school after articles on gay students. Two district attorneys in Tennessee say they are considering prosecuting and imprisoning librarians.

These are just a few examples of how right-wing state authorities are increasingly using government or police powers to crack down on teaching about history, race and sexuality in schools and even universities. It is now absurdly fashionable to denounce exposing children to cross-dressing performers as “grooming” for sexual abuse, as if the English tradition of Christmas pantomime were a nefarious perversion.

Typically, these same conservatives spent years wailing in outrage about left-wing “cancel culture”. Unfortunately, liberal repression is an all-too-real phenomenon. Although it does not involve the threat of handcuffs and prison cells, at universities and in some sections of the media it has certainly involved unjust dismissal or harassment.

The public shaming that can befall ordinary, and even to some extent arbitrary, people who become the targets of liberal outrage online is real and alarming.

One of the earliest and most infamous instances of the online outrage mob phenomenon came in 2013 when a woman named Justine Sacco with just 170 followers, tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!” It was horribly insensitive and easily construed as racist, but her life was almost entirely destroyed because of the online backlash, which snowballed into a crushing and frighteningly disproportionate repudiation. Numerous instances of this dynamic have demonstrated how social media has been engineered to fuel dangerous levels of mass outrage, as journalist Max Fisher explains in his invaluable new book, The Chaos Machine.

Often public figures targeted by “cancel culture” ultimately volunteer to be truly cancelled, if they ever are. When George Washington University professor Jessica Krug was exposed as pretending for her entire career to be black when she was, in fact, white and Jewish, she wrote: “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.” But, she added, “What does that mean? I don’t know.” Ultimately, she resigned her tenured position.

But as politicians like former Republican president Donald Trump after the “Access Hollywood” videotape in which he boasted about routinely sexually assaulting women, or former Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and Lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax, all demonstrated in different ways and to varying degrees, brazening out highly embarrassing accusations is always an option – unless the state deems your teaching a criminal offence.

Many of the greatest freedoms Americans are used to are not age-old, as often assumed. Voting rights for all Americans, and therefore full democracy, and wide-ranging freedom of speech, were both established in the 1960s. Before then, millions of African Americans were denied the franchise, and much free expression that is taken for granted today was liable to civil or criminal penalties.

The minute I saw denunciations of “cancel culture”, I should have known ideological censorship couldn’t be far behind. I let my hubris and naivety get the better of me. But that is how pervasive and hypocritical censorship has become in present-day America.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2022/09/05/bidens-speech-about-democracy-in-peril-missed-crucial-points-about-americas-future/

The President should have proposed National Service and inspirational projects to heal national divisions.

On Thursday, US President Joe Biden delivered what should have been a landmark primetime address about the dangers that Republican extremism, led by former president Donald Trump, poses to the US constitutional order. All broadcast TV networks all declined to carry Mr. Biden’s address, preferring reruns including an episode of the game show “Press Your Luck” entitled “Zombie Apocalypse Ready.” Well, exactly.

The president’s supporters were outraged, but the speech was so wanting the networks probably did him a favor.

Republicans, inevitably, are expressing – or feigning – fury and demanding apologies. That’s absurd because everything Mr Biden said about their party is true, and hate-speech from members of the Republican Party is so atrocious that they are in no position to contradict his assertions or challenge his tone. They are indeed angry dividers.

Yet the speech misfired badly, especially by not offering Americans a cause around which to unite other than a contentious Democratic partisan agenda.

The venue was appropriate enough, Independence Hall in Philadelphia being the birthplace of American democracy. But Mr Biden was weirdly bathed in an eerie, unpleasant red glow that evoked misguided “Dark Brandon” internet memes that jokingly depict him as an all-powerful and somewhat sinister figure. The uniformed Marines in the background also looked highly inappropriate.

Everything Mr Biden said about how Mr Trump has turned much of the Republican Party into supporters of a “semi-fascist” MAGA cult is undoubtedly correct. And he was wise to insist that “a majority of Republicans” are not part of that movement – although he provided no grounds to distinguish “semi-fascist MAGA” versus “mainstream” Republicans he insists he respects.

Worse, he didn’t contrast the nefarious MAGA movement with a simply nonpartisan, patriotic appeal to national unity based on shared values like honouring election outcomes and the legitimacy of adversary’s victories, rejecting political violence and intimidation and respecting the principle of majority rule. Since Thursday, he’s been wisely recasting his positions to emphasise these crucial points which should have always been the substance of his attack on the MAGA agenda but often got lost in his speech last week.

Mr Biden’s advisers failed him badly by not editing out a misplaced checklist of his legislative and governance accomplishments – which correspond to a liberal, rather than a national nonpartisan, agenda – that often made the speech sound awkwardly and inappropriately like a boastful state of the union address. The ideological content was simply too strong not to gravely undermine any appeal to nonpartisan democratic values instead drowning them in partisan Democratic goals.

Mr Biden didn’t make a serious effort to reach out to Republicans across the ideological divide beyond simply invoking the Constitution and other familiar, even hackneyed, tropes. He might have acknowledged, for example, legitimate disagreements about abortion or same-sex marriage. He certainly should have recognised that outgoing Republican representative Liz Cheney voted against almost all his legislative “achievements,” yet she is a singular champion of the battle to preserve American democracy, precisely because those two agendas are, and must remain, completely separate.

Mr Biden also needed to acknowledge Democrats, too, have helped undermine constitutional legitimacy. In the current midterm campaigns, Democrats have repeatedly funded some of the most extreme fringe candidates, who can only be described as semi-fascist, in Republican primaries, hoping they will be easier to defeat than more mainstream Republicans in the November general elections. The President should have expressed disgust at such cynical recklessness and acknowledged that promoting these extremists can only contribute to the rise of the MAGA movement.

He should also have  acknowledged that a few Democratic lawmakers in 2004 and 2016 rejected certified electors, albeit symbolically, a move that Mr Trump tried to organise into a mass revolt in Congress to overthrow the whole 2020 election. In hindsight, it should be easy enough to admit how unacceptable and foolish that was.

All that would have prevented the speech from sounding like a partisan attack on Republicans in general and less a defense of democracy than of the Democrats.

But beyond accepting the legitimacy of major disagreements on emotive issues and the contributions by Democrats to damaging US constitutional norms, Mr Biden, above all, failed to propose a solution to begin to reunite Americans.

He should have proposed two mandatory years of national service by every young American, regardless of factors like income and geography, coming together to serve the country – whether in the military or a wide range of other organised, collective public service initiatives.

Not only would this mobilise the energy and power of youth in service of the country, it would bring Americans together at an early age to meet each other and work together across barriers of geography, economic and social class, race, religion, ethnicity, culture and many other major chasms. It is because of those profound social divisions that many Americans never meet one another. Americans of different “tribes” simply don’t know each other, never get a chance to work together in a common cause, and are not brought together to share sweat and tears, danger and labor, commitment and passion, to defend, build and develop their country and society.

If Mr Biden can’t get Congress to mandate two years of national service, he can push for one. If he cannot get mandatory national service through at all, at least he leaves to his successors this proposed vital part of a deeply rooted American solution to a major US crisis. National service for young Americans can be legitimately and accurately cast as a first step toward healing the country, invoking the great collective victories of the two World Wars, the Great Depression and the Cold War, the space race that put an American on the moon and so much more. He could have linked the programme to any number of inspirational, aspirational goals, like his cherished goal of defeating cancer that he cited in the speech, a manned trip to Mars, massive rebuilding of national infrastructure or whichever other projects would inspire American passions.

Praising the sanctity of elections and majority rule is just not enough. Most Americans want to heal. They yearn to come together. They need to dream together. Last week, the president did not conjure a vision to seize the imagination and inspire collective national efforts, and he did not seem to even try.

Yet Americans urgently need, and most genuinely want, a shared national agenda to replace the self-destructive tribal feuding that empowers some demagogues but is rupturing and corroding their society. Mr Biden should try again after the midterms, whatever the results, with less focus on the MAGA peril and much more on a vision for a great American future.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-01/moqtada-al-sadr-couldn-t-master-iraq-s-democracy-so-he-s-crushing-it?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

The Shiite leader ended the deadly rioting in the Green Zone, but his shortcomings as both a cleric and politician have culminated in disaster.

After two nights of violence that left more than 20 dead in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, which houses most of Iraq’s government apparatus, the political system that emerged after the 2003 US invasion is on the edge of collapse.

It’s hardly the first crisis of this sort, but it is the most dangerous in many years: Iraq’s most potent political figure, the mercurial Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, finally appears willing to bring down a system he has failed to master.

Sadr’s career has been built on the legacy of his father and uncle, two of the most revered Shiite religious authorities of their generation. While he lacks their erudition and religious credentials, and had no governmental experience, Sadr succeeded in building religious and political authority in tandem, each complementing the other. And that has made him a remarkably toxic figure in contemporary Iraq.

After parliamentary elections in October 2021 left his supporters — the primary Shiite anti-Iran faction in Iraqi politics — with 73 seats, twice as many as the nearest rival, Sadr spent months trying and failing to form a government. His frustration led to a series of astonishing miscalculations culminating this summer.

On June 15, he ordered his members of parliament to resign en masse, hoping either to gain leverage for a final effort to form a government or to force new elections. Rival political factions called his bluff, and his seats at the Council of Representatives were quickly filled by runners-up from Shiite pro-Iranian parties. To stop them from forming a government, Sadr ordered his followers to begin a sit-in at the Green Zone to block parliamentary functions.

On Monday, his father’s clerical successor, Grand Ayatollah Kadhem al-Haeri, who is based in Iran, dealt Sadr’s ambitions a major blow. He announced his retirement and instructed his followers to transfer their loyalty to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, while lambasting Sadr for ripping apart Shiite communities and being unworthy of his family name.

That prompted Sadr to suddenly announce he was quitting politics. His enraged supporters attacked the main government palace, setting off the clashes.

To salvage his reputation, Sadr cannily apologized to the Iraqi people for the bloodshed — a remarkable gesture in a country with a strong tradition of authoritarian-minded leaders — and ordered his followers to leave the Green Zone. They did so on Tuesday, ending the clashes and underscoring his unique ability to command not merely armed militias but vast and devoted crowds.

Still, since prevailing in last October’s elections, Sadr has been flailing wildly to convert his competitive advantages into practical political power. He’s not entirely at fault. His pro-Iranian Shiite rivals are more reckless, dangerous and violent. Kurdish groups are hopelessly divided, while Sunni factions are split largely between groups aligned with different Gulf Arab patrons.

The post-2003 Iraqi political system was always wretched, but why is Sadr only now ready, willing and able to bring it crashing down?

His political potency can’t gain him much more by way of clerical authority, particularly given the brutal denunciations such as Haeri’s. And his clerical and rabble-rousing qualities didn’t help him master the financial and patronage gamesmanship involved in forging a government in a parliamentary system.

Sadr’s efforts to combine religious authority based mainly on his ancestry and political power based on operating behind the scenes, in a system in which administrative authority rests with ministries and government offices, simply failed — just as he reached the peak of his ambitions. It’s unlikely that he, or another Iraqi political figure, will any time soon garner direct control of as many as 73 seats in the 329-member parliament.

Impatience is Sadr’s worst enemy. He lacks the discipline to earn the academic-based Shiite clerical authority to which he aspires. And he failed to endure the lengthy, frustrating negotiations to form a government that should’ve been his for the asking.

Now Sadr claims to be leaving politics, but no one believes him. He’s said it several times before, and he is still the most significant political figure in Iraq. But now he also insists that the post-2003 system has to go, presumably because it manifestly failed to serve his interests.

Yet he seems to have no plan, let alone a viable one, for an alternative national political structure. Any effort to formally combine religious and political authority in Iraq, along Iranian lines, is doomed since the nation does not have a large enough Shiite majority (Sunni Muslims compose at least 35% of the population), and there is strong opposition to such an agenda within the Shiite community itself.

Also, both Iran and the US have a vested interest in saving the political system; both would be deeply concerned by greater instability in Iraq. Iran, however, has given the green light to its proxies to confront Sadr politically, while the US is wisely keeping a low profile (while undoubtedly working behind the scenes to strengthen the caretaker prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi).

But the Iraqis are going to have to restore their own equilibrium. No one else can do it for them. Sadr’s effort to combine his religious and political ambitions, always somewhat contradictory, now appears to have reached an impasse. Iraq is paying the price.