Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts

http://www.fpif.org/fpifzines/wb/5268

by JOHN FEFFER | Monday, June 2, 2008
Vol. 3, No. 22

My first introduction to the Second Thoughts crowd was in 1989 when I
attended a conference at Krakow's Jagiellonian University and took a
seat in the audience near Fawn Hall. Yes, that Fawn Hall: the
secretary who dutifully shredded compromising documents for Oliver
North during the Iran-Contra days. She was part of a tour put
together by those rowdy former editors of radical Ramparts magazine,
Peter Collier and David Horowitz. The delegation included many former
leftists like Joshua Muravchik, the Young People's Socialist Leaguer
turned American Enterprise Institute think-tanker. Where Fawn Hall
fit in, I'm still not sure. Perhaps Horowitz just needed arm candy.
(Hall was, after all, Playboy's "Sex Star of 1987.")

Collier and Horowitz, who must have suffered serious intellectual
whiplash when they traded their Che berets for Gipper pins, had
brought their troupe to the Polish city of Krakow in order to teach
the Solidarity government-to-be a thing or two about political
about-faces. Alas, the Solidarity crowd just drank it up. Within a
year, Poland would swerve from disintegrating communism to a
labor-union-supported government to shock-therapy neo-liberalism.
Collier and Horowitz can't take credit for this transformation. It
would have happened even without their intervention. But it seemed,
at the time, that everyone was having second thoughts: neo-Marxists
were becoming neo-cons, Yippies were becoming Yuppies. And Collier
and Horowitz were organizing Second Thoughts conferences left and
right (well, mostly right) until, finally, the fad died out in the
Clinton years and they had to make a (dis)honest living doing
something else, like putting together an Anti-Chomsky Reader and
rooting out supposed liberal bias in academe.

When I read of What Happened, Scott McClellan's literary stab in the
back of the Bush administration, I thought, "Hey, why should the
Right have all the fun?" It's time to put together a Second Thoughts
conference of our own.

After all, George W. Bush has probably pushed more people to the left
than Noam Chomsky. The new generation of Second Thoughts would
include all the disillusioned military brass, such as Army General
Eric Shinseki and Marine General Anthony Zinni. Then there are the
conservative thinkers, like Francis Fukuyama and Larry Diamond, who
became disgusted with the political incompetence of U.S. policy in
Iraq. Let's also throw in Cold Warriors George P. Shultz and Henry
Kissinger who now support a world without nuclear weapons. Let's also
salt the delegation with former high-level appointees like former
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who blasted Bush's economic and
foreign policy. David Kuo and John DiIulio exposed the faith-based
initiatives as bunkum. Matthew Dowd, Lawrence Wilkerson, and Paul
Pillar all fell away from the Church of Bush. And let's add Media
Matters for America president David Brock, who was blinded by the
right, fell from his high horse, and now sees the light.

Okay, I know, they're not all progressives now. They haven't become
critics of U.S. empire like Chalmers Johnson (who was once himself
one of the more conservative scholars of Asia). But as we approach
the 2008 elections, let's go big tent and put together a star-studded
group to tour the swing states. Let's also send these new Second
Thoughters to college campuses in a political version of Scared
Straight. Now given the pallid new name of the Juvenile Awareness
Program, the program sends ex-cons to schools to scare kids away from
doing drugs, stealing cars, and killing people. In our version of
shock therapy, Scottie McClellan and David Brock and Eric Shinseki
would warn kids not to listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Bill O'Reilly
or read Ann Coulter. Otherwise, they too might one day be party to
murder abroad (like Iraq) or theft at home (like the Bush tax policy).

Maybe we could even lure Fawn Hall to join the tour. After her trip
to Krakow, she married the former manager of the Doors and survived
cocaine addiction. More importantly, she survived the intellectual
drugs that Collier, Horowitz, and Muravchik were dispensing. I'm sure
she's ready for a whole new set of second thoughts.

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