Holy Chaitred

Students of the radical left may remember Robert Borosage. Borosage was at one time the Director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a New Left think tank that seemed faithfully to promote the Soviet Union’s propaganda line on the foreign policy issues of the moment. Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac have a good account of IPS and its offshoots in their 1983 book The Coercive Utopians.
IPS came into its own in the ’80s during the Reagan administration; it was in the forefront of those advocating unilateral disarmament, the virtual elimination of intelligence services, and the abandonment of American allies in the face of “liberation” movements.
In the ’80s IPS undertook a joint program promoting unilateral disarmament with the Soviet Union’s Institute for the U.S.A. and Canada and the USSR-USA Friendship Society, then both formidable propaganda organs of the Soviet Union. In May 1983 the joint program held its first sesion in Minneapolis.
Borosage appears in the lead of the report on the event attended yesterday at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Boston by Weekly Standard reporter Jonathan Last. Last is probably too young to know anything about Borosage’s somewhat exotic background, but it’s the key to the rest of his report.
Yesterday afternoon Last attended a “Take Back America” rally sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future (of which Borosage is now co-director) featuring appearances by Howard Dean and Michael Moore. At the rally Last heard a substantially different Howard Dean than the one on display at the Democratic convention yesterday evening. The Dean heard by Last rang true to the “progressive” agenda pursued by the IPS in its various guises.
Dean more or less warmed up the crowd for Michael Moore. The audience thrilled to Moore’s performance. Last deduces that Moore “is no longer just a crank or a provocateur. He has become a liberal saint.” Last’s report is “Here comes trouble.”
This is an important piece, especially in the context of the Borosage connnection. At NRO Byron York also reports on Moore’s performance in “Michael Moore loses it.”
Tony Blankley’s column today meditates on the phenomenon Last observed at the Royal Sonesta, the irrational hatred of President Bush that we have dubbed Chaitred in honor of the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who first articulated and sought to justify the phenomenon as an intellectually respectable position. Blankley’s column seems to me a contribution to understanding the events unfolding before our eyes: “The hate cure.”