Question: what do Suhas Rao and the recent Republican voter ID (read: voter suppression) laws in PA, FL and elsewhere have in common?
Answer: both involve cheating by the perpetrators in question.
With the brazen Republican attempts to suppress by legal means as many Democratically inclined voters as possible, the cheating aspect is obvious. (You'll note that not a single Democratic governor has tried to push anything comparable.) However, some of you may wonder who Suhas Rao is. If you listen to NPR's All Things Considered 2 days back, you've actually heard about what he did recently, though in a story that didn't mention his name. The SNLC title gives it away, namely that....
....Rao cheated at the National Scrabble Tournament this week, and was caught red-handed. ATC talked about it here, with Stefan Fatsis in conversation with Melissa Block. The nature of the cheating was that:
"What he's accused of, is squirreling away the blank tiles before the start of a game."
Just before that, Fatsis said:
"Well, I'm not going to name the player because he is a student. He's a youth."
Well, someone else took the trouble of naming the name, at
this blog post. Fatsis also noted what happened to Rao:
"....he was immediately ejected from the tournament. He'll be suspended from playing in tournament SCRABBLE for a long, long time."
Rao's Scrabble Association page is
here. He competed earlier this year in the National School Scrabble Championship, as noted at the Wake County (NC) Public School System page
here. Results from a recent School Scrabble Academy competition are
here.
One sense of how players at the tournament were repulsed by this behavior is shown by Fatsis' further comment:
"The kids were very upset because it's one of their own, and it's hard for them to understand why someone would do something like this. The cheating episode occurred yesterday afternoon, and word spread throughout the room immediately. And the mood was one of disgust, that this kind of behavior would occur; and sadness that this poor kid is going to have to deal with this very, very hard lesson on ethics and integrity when competing.
To give you a sense of how players feel about cheating, the award ceremony concluded a short a while ago. The player who caught the kid cheating - who caught the kid setting aside the two blank tiles - received a standing ovation when his name was announced."
Compared to the Repuke voter suppression campaign, this cheating incident is trivial, of course. But Rao's action is symptomatic of the "win by any means" mentality that is all too common in US society. Hence Romney's continual stream of lies, too thick to keep track of, about President Obama and the Democrats, and the Republican-led voter ID/Democratic voter suppression measures brazenly designed to tamp down Democratic votes and deliver swing states to the Romney/Ryan Road to Ruin ticket. Not that we're saints ourselves, but as I said, there is no comparable Democratic attempt at suppressing Republican votes. Wouldn't it be nice if the lamestream media, not to mention honest Republicans (yes, such people do exist, but they don't get heard much above teabagger nastiness that's the current Repuke mainstream), had the integrity of the great majority of Scrabble players? Yeah, dream on.....
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week. Bonus points if they're Scrabble-related ;-P .....