Andrew Speaker: You, Sir, Are An Asshole.

So what do you all think about contracting drug-resistant tuberculosis because some infected fucking shithead is in the coach seat next to you, hacking and spewing all through the in-flight movie? Doesn’t sound too appealing, does it?

TB is treated with a drug cocktail that’s fairly effective. As a result, it was almost eradicated in the USA a few years ago. Rumor has it drug-resistant TB came out of the Russian prison system, where TB is rampant, but where the government only had part of the cocktail at any given time, so they treated the infected prisoners with a half-assed cure. It didn’t work. The TB got resistant to the individual drugs, and now we have a super bug going around. And lest we forget, TB kills people.

So, what does Mr. Speaker do when told by his doctors that he should not, under any circumstances, travel anywhere? He gets on a plane and flies to Paris, then travels to Italy, where he ignores an order to present himself to the authorities. He flees to Prague, Czech Republic, where he gets on a plane to Montreal. Then he drives over the US/Canadian border, where he finally is put in quarantine. And then he starts his bitching.

"I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," he told [the Atlanta Journal-Constitution]. "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing.”

I repeat: Mr. Speaker, you are a fucking asshole.

Mr. Speaker is a personal injury attorney, which in all likelihood predisposes him to being an asshole already. Now, I may be wrong about this, but I would assume you can’t generally sue someone for giving you an illness, otherwise the court system would be flooded with common cold litigation. But when you ignore your doctor’s orders and get comfy in a confined, warm place like an airplane cabin while in possession of an airborne contagion in your lungs, and then proceed to traipse through Europe, that seems to me to be more than your usual level of negligence. That seems like deliberate obnoxious disregard for anyone else in the world, and that sounds like Mr. Speaker should pay damages through the ass. Opinion, AV?

Mr. Speaker did not want to cancel his honeymoon. I am of two minds on this. First, if he didn’t want to cancel his honeymoon because he was looking forward to his special week in Europe with his new wife, then he’s a selfish fucking asshole with a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement issues. Reschedule, you dumb fuck.

If, on the other hand, he didn’t want to reschedule because his new wife would constantly complain about not going on her honeymoon, then allow me to be the first to inform you, Mr. Speaker, that you have married a complete bitch. If the personal discomfort of tuberculosis and the jeopardizing of public health isn’t an acceptable excuse to reschedule your vacation, nothing will ever be an acceptable excuse for anything. Imagine what she’ll be like when you don’t take out the garbage.

So yeah, I can see the need for an armed guard, since you clearly can’t be relied upon to make responsible decisions. Personally, I believe everyone else on the planes you boarded should get a chance to punch you in your fucking nut-sack. You’re definitely entitled to that.

Well, that’s how I felt two days ago when I wrote this. But then yesterday I came across this article. So maybe you all can disregard the above post; but somehow I doubt it, seeing how the guy’s father-in-law is a fucking CDC scientist who specializes in tuberculosis. I'm thinking Andy probably had a fairly good idea that traveling was a bad idea.

In other news, I was tested for tuberculosis last week, for no other reason than it’s a requirement of my job.

You should all be happy to know that I don’t have it, so I will be able to fly to Ireland next month.

Woo-hoo!