By John Burtis
Friday, June 1, 2007
These immortal words, so often crooned by the legendary columnist and talk host Howie Carr on WRKO, perfectly describe the supremely reckless and selfish behavior displayed by the now legendary Mr. Andrew Speaker.
How many more, indeed, Mistah Speakah, Mistah Andrew Speakah, how many more poor innocent travelers could you have infected and possibly killed if you tried? Not too many more, it now seems, although he could have camped out at LAX for a week or two or sat on the tarmac at O'Hare for a couple of hours in company with a with load of poor folks jammed in next to him on some other airline all cheek by jowl.
And which song best describes his flagrant assault on the health, present and future, and the sensibilities of his fellow travelers, who never knew that they were on the receiving end of a fatal disease every time this criminally liable jamoke cleared his throat, sneezed into his sleeve, or blew his nose – "I'm a Traveling Man," or "Every Breath You Take?"
So, now we have Andy Speaker entering the border security and aircraft hall of fame for traveling with some sort of fatal and highly contagious lung disease, knowing that he had it, for acting outrageously even though he is a, get this, personal injury attorney, whose future father-in-law is a, now relish this, a medical researcher at the CDC who specializes in tuberculosis, whose future wife is in her third year of law school and will try emulate this joker when she passes the bar, and finally for giving the phalanx of Italian authorities the slip in Rome when they wanted to quarantine him. Come on, Tennessee Williams couldn't concoct a better story, nor could the poor lost John Kennedy Toole find a bigger dunce to add to our growing confederacy.
Now call me crazy, but I guess I'm a little put off by the fact that this hapless TB dude, who appears on the news with a nice gold colored necktie, a tailored suit, and a contagious toothy smile, was able to travel unmolested between Atlanta, Paris, Prague, Athens, Rome, Montreal, and New York State. And all of this coughing and breathing of germs all over everybody from hell and back comes after he was told not to travel by a top medical man.
This sad caper also illustrates how porous our highly touted border security net remains under Homeland Security.
For chrissakes, here's a guy on the top echelon ICE watch list who rents a car in Canada and drives across the US border without the merest whiff of a problem raised from the Border Patrol at his point of entry. This ongoing madness illustrates how extremely lucky we were when that poor Millenium bombing schlep was sheep hooked in Washington state when that pleasant woman opened his rental car trunk and found, gasp, the entire amount of terrorist explosives seized between 1992-2000.
Surely you remember that bug eyed Middle Eastern gentleman with the trunk full of hazardous chemicals? His snaring was the absolute pinnacle of US security activities during the late, great, and really pretty serious on cracking down on terror Clinton administration, and whose records of the Millenium incident were either filched, changed, left under a construction trailer, or shredded by that other world famous personal injury attorney, Sandy Burglar, whose own prosecution was a bigger joke than this entire Andy Speaker deal will be, but who's had the good sense to give up his law license.
And Ted Kennedy and John McCain want to rely on this same famously invisible "virtual" fence, hope, and a prayer, as long as it's not intoned on federal property, to curb and corral the veritable floodtide of illegal aliens and guys like Mistah Andy Speakah when they crawl over and under the long dusty southern border line or rent cars in Montreal to slip down on us, unannounced, from the Great White North.
Now this guy Mr. Speakah is either a liberal Democrat or crazy, and I suspect both. But judging from his obvious selfishness and his supreme sense of entitlement, combined with the idea that national and international laws don't apply to him, especially in view of his utter callousness exhibited toward his seat-mates, it all sure moves him over to the liberal wing of things where the beautiful people are above the laws and strictures which govern us common folk.
And somewhere in New York a couple of fire guys and a few fellows from Avis, Hertz or Enterprise or some such are standing in front of his abandoned rental car right now and wondering if they have to kit up in full rubber suits and self-contained breathing rigs before they open it up, tow it away, and burn it out somewhere safe.
How many more on our watch lists, Mistah Speakah, are we going to allow into America to do harm to our citizens? And this is the real question which the weak as water on defense and supine Democrats and the Hispanic hustling Republicans need to ask themselves now that we know the answer.
Bah, watch list! Just drive on through and, oh, Osama will take note of this fiasco.
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