BAGHDAD

HADI AL-MAHDI, a man you might call the Rush Limbaugh of Iraq, bounded up the stairs to a radio studio in a converted villa beside the Tigris River. “Today,” he said, with impish determination, “we are going to defend the Sunnis.”

For the next hour Mr. Mahdi, a Shiite married to a Kurd, did just that. In a sonorous, sarcastic voice, he ridiculed the murky process that disqualified Sunni candidates in Iraq’s recent elections as an assault on the multiethnic, multifaith democracy Iraq is supposed to be creating.

As the sun set on another dusty Baghdad evening rush, he condemned not only the man behind the disqualifications (“He’s illiterate.”), but also Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki (“Is there glue in your chair?”); Mr. Maliki’s main challenger in the election, Ayad Allawi; the ministers of education and electricity; “this dirty Parliament”; and the rest of Iraqi officialdom “living in the Green Zone, while your family is living abroad.”

He added: “Who is going to die? Your son?”

Mr. Mahdi’s program — “To Whoever Listens” on Radio Demozy, 104.1 FM — is a thrice-weekly, populist jeremiad of all that is wrong with Iraq’s fledgling democracy, and one measure of what the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has led to.