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I’ve been following the story of Andrew Speaker, the insanely selfish man who traveled on commercial flights even though he has a drug-resistant forum of tuberculosis, since before it even hit the main headlines. I found the story in the beginning an obscure news feed service.

I’ve said a lot about how I feel on my other blogs and have held off ever since the fool stupidly released his name and face to the public. Perhaps he already knows he is destined to die of the TB and doesn’t care that a large portion of the American population wants to see him flayed alive.

Let’s Think
Think about this situation as though YOU were the one who had been told you have TB. Now, think about the conversation with the medical people who are telling you, in the very least, they suggest you not fly commercially and especially internationally. I am 100% sure I would not step foot on that airplane. Vacations, weddings, honeymoons and the like can be rescheduled. Risking the possibility that you could give an innocent person sitting close to you on the plane a life threatening disease is NOT something you can go back and undo.

And no matter how much Speaker weeps on television and attempts to sound humble and sorry, it still stands that he KNEW he had the disease and had known long enough to have ALREADY made plans to go to Colorado for top of the line treatment. Most people would have gone directly to treatment. Speaker chose to wait until he had selfishly jetted all over the world, breathing his dangerous disease on countless people.

Is Speaker a blithering idiot?
I’m going to assume he is not. He is an attorney, someone who successfully completed schooling that required all sorts of higher level thinking. He attended the Naval Academy. He passed the Bar exam. He has been practicing law (albeit personal injury and divorce, so he’s no shining star when it comes to working in law). He is no simpleton. What he is, though, is sublimely self centered and arrogant.

Speaker would have you feel sorry for him. He says that before he even flew out of the country, “I had one shot, and that was going to be in Denver,” at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, which specializes in treating drug-resistant forms of TB. If he was somewhere else and was not given the exact right mixture of drugs, he said, “That was it, they blew my last shot.”

So why wait? Why put your personal desires to fly to Europe ahead of your own health, your bride’s health and the health of countless unwitting individuals?

What I’d Like To See
I hope he lives. Why? So he can be disbarred, sued and shamed for the rest of his life. Karma, baby. It always comes back to bite you in the rear end. His law firm is just him and his father. I am predicting that this fiasco will take them to their knees. Who in their right mind would hire a lawyer to give you advice on your divorce or child custody when he has displayed such a lack of common sense in his own life? If he cannot be bothered to do the right thing in everyday life, then he does not deserve to make a living telling other people what to do.