Eight Feet Deep

Fox News, which can be sanc­ti­mo­nious as often as it can demon­strate a right-wing bias, jumped on the Deni­son, Texas, school dis­trict today for releas­ing the ele­men­tary school records of Ches­ley B. “Sully” Sul­len­berger III. Sul­len­berger was the United Air­lines pilot who mirac­u­lously landed his Air­bus A320 in New York’s Hud­son River Thurs­day with­out any loss of life or life-threatening injuries.

The news story on the Fox News Web site said the dis­trict released the 57-year-old Sullenberger’s records, which were almost a half-century old, by acci­dent. And even though Fox’s head­line cas­ti­gates the Deni­son dis­trict for giv­ing out the pri­vate infor­ma­tion, the net­work doesn’t see any­thing wrong with run­ning a copy of those same records for all to see. Luck­ily Sul­len­berger was a very intel­li­gent indi­vid­ual as a young man as well as in adult­hood so per­haps the release won’t be too upset­ting to him.

Sul­len­berger is right­fully being hailed as a hero for his actions. That is almost as obvi­ous as his intel­li­gence and his over­whelm­ing luck. For as one news per­son noted yes­ter­day, when­ever a plane crashes rarely is just one thing that has gone wrong but it instead is a chain of events. All the events involved in the ditch­ing yes­ter­day, the flock of geese excepted, seemed to go right for Sul­len­berger, his crew and his very alive passengers.