Though Sailing Blind, Still the Pilot Cries 'Full Speed Ahead' (Page 1 of 2)

Just how wasteful, blind and arrogant is this pilot?

Consider all the ruined lives, wasted oil, the staggering costs of cleaning up this mess.

Consider the contempt for world treasures, the environment.

Mostly, though, consider his sickening lack of judgment.

Even when sailing blindly through dense fog, he stays the course.

Even among icons of world heritage, he cries, "Full speed ahead." Against the advice of cooler heads, his motto is the same.

When told about deficiencies in equipment before launching, he went ahead anyway.

Even after the magnitude of his errors became clear, he gave out false information about the costs, the causes, the cure.

Even now he makes excuses. Even now he's clueless.

No, I'm not talking about President George W. Bush, I'm talking about Capt. John Cota, pilot of the container ship Cosco Busan when it ran into the San Francisco Bay Bridge five weeks ago and spilt 58,000 gallons of deadly fuel oil into the bay.

Still, the Cosco Busan may be the perfect metaphor for how this country charged into the Middle East to “shock-and-awe” people who'd done us no harm. The pilot could be a stand-in for the commander-in-chief on our ship of state. Their offenses are identical. Lacking in judgment, sailing blind, ignoring the cost, ignoring geography, failing to understand the equipment under their control, telling lies, having general arrogance and worse. Of course, there are differences, mostly of scale, and the biggest one is this:

No one with any power has the guts to hold Bush accountable before the law.

In Cota's case, there's a state agency, the Board of Pilot Commissioners for the Bays of San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun. They've suspended Cota's license and given him 15 days to respond. On Dec. 6, they produced a six-page document called an "accusation" that laid out the case against Cota. The board minced no words. According to a story in the Dec. 7 San Jose Mercury News, the board said the shipwreck was "a direct result of Captain Cota's piloting." The United States could use such a board on the national level. The Senate, the House and Supreme Court apparently are useless when it comes to holding Bush accountable for invading Iraq based on lies, killing lots of people there and hinting he might try it in Iran. Toss in kidnapping, torture, wiretapping, environmental damage, media manipulation, attempts to cover up global warming and sleeping at the wheel on Sept. 11, and you have a pretty strong bill of high crimes and misdemeanors. Still, hints on the breeze suggest members of the military, media, politicians and others are beginning to stand up to Bush and his co-pilot Cheney — and for good reason. The arrogance of this crew is breathtaking. Just hours after the National Intelligence Estimate became public last week and we learned that all our nation's intelligence agencies combined had concluded  Iran ceased its nuclear program years ago, Bush could still be heard saying, implicitly: full speed ahead.

"To me, the NIE provides an opportunity for us to rally the international community — to continue to rally the community— to pressure the Iranian regime to suspend its program," said Bush. "Nothing's changed."

It's even worse than Capt. Cota's lack of judgment. At least Cota was in a literal fog. Bush's affliction appears to be mental. It's as if he were telling Iran, "Yes, our best minds agree that you have no nuke program, so come clean and show me where it's at, or we're going to get really nasty." Come to think of it, that's about what happened in Iraq. With enough missiles in the Persian Gulf now to turn that region into a lifeless moonscape, the danger of staying the course could hardly be clearer.

Full speed ahead? Five years ago our cap'n said that, and 90 percent of the crew and passengers saluted. Signs abound it won't go so easy for Bush this time around. Consider: Five years ago, not only mouthpiece media, like Fox News Channel, but even so-called "liberal" media like the New York Times, ABC News and CNN were allowing themselves to be used to report phony stories about aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium, aerial drones, anthrax, al-Qaeda connections and more — stories that history has finally blown away for the phony plants they were.