Andrew Speaker, Selfish Twit?

This guy is going to give lawyers a bad name. He gets tuburculosis and is told not to fly but does anyway. His story is that he wasn't instructed not to fly to Europe, per se. But, once in Europe when he was told in no uncertain terms not to fly, well,

Speaker said he and his wife were "scared out of our minds" at the prospect of being indefinitely placed in an Italian hospital and dying there.

So his response is to place all those folks on the airline at risk?

Not real bright for a personal injury lawyer. I can smell the "negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress" lawsuits even now. Let's see, could he have chartered a private flight home? How about making arrangements to fly with appropriate precautions, like buying the seats around him and wearing a protective mask? How about working with his new father-in-law:

Speaker's new father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a CDC microbiologist whose specialty is TB and other bacteria.

Seems like dad-in-law ought to have been able to work something out, short of exposing an entire plane to TB. And the flight was half way around the world, not just a one or two hour deal.

Although he's apologizing now, he didn't sound very repentant at first.

"I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," he told the newspaper. "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."

The case also calls into question just how secure our borders are, when we can't keep out a known TB carrier that we're trying to keep out.