XPost: nyc.politics, alt.politics.liberalism, sac.politics
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh

RIO DE JANEIRO - Ryan Lochte is the dumbest bell that ever rang.
The 32-year-old swimmer is so landlocked in juvenility that he
pulled an all-nighter with guys young enough to call him uncle.
His story to NBC's Billy "what-are-you-wearing" Bush had the
quality of a kid exaggerating the size of a fish, and notice how
he was the hero of every detail. That was always the most
dubious, implausible part.

There is a special category of obnoxious American "bro" that
Lochte represents, in his T-shirt and jeans and expensive suede
footwear, which he showed off on Instagram that night at the
party along with the price tag. "We're 6k deep here," he
captioned it. Is there anything worse, in any country, than a
bunch of entitled young drunks who break the furniture and pee
on a wall?

There is no translator needed for that one, no cultural norm
that excuses it. If I'd been working at that Brazilian gas
station, I might've pulled a gun on them, too.

Jack Conger is 21. Gunnar Bentz is 20. James Feigen is 26. What
a leader of young men Lochte is. You can see the bathroom door
appear to burst out of its wooden frame on the security video,
presumably when one of those oafs couldn't open it and decided
to kick it.

Look, having a gun drawn on you in the small hours was no doubt
unnerving, and an overreaction by the security guard. It's even
remotely possible that Lochte really did interpret the demand
for cash as a "robbery" of sorts. But in order to do so, he had
to be so impervious to his own odious punk behavior, and his
view of that gas station had to be so low, that he didn't think
the vandalizing was worth anything. He must have thought Ryan
Lochte's pee was gold dust.

Inherent in all of Lochte's statements in this controversy is a
lack of respect. You suspect that's what drew such ire from
Brazilian authorities, who made a massive public display out of
jerking Conger and Bentz off a plane and detaining them for
questioning, and recommended charges against Lochte and Feigen.
Lochte has played a trivial, frivolous game with the issue of
Brazilian police ineffectualness and corruption. Two things are
going on here at once: Lochte's self-promoting prevarications,
and the sensitivity of Rio authorities, who have been portrayed
as incapable of keeping athletes safe amid other Olympic
breakdowns.

There have been a lot of genuine robberies of Olympic athletes
and officials. A New Zealand athlete was kidnapped by fake
police and driven to ATMs. Two Australian coaches were robbed at
knifepoint on Ipanema Beach. After one of their athletes was
robbed at gunpoint Tuesday morning, British track and field
officials warned athletes that it is not worth the risk of going
out, "given the current climate in Rio."

The police need to show that fears are overstated and these
Games are secure - though they are not, particularly - and the
stupid Americans offered them something with which to save face.
Fernando Veloso, the Civil Police chief, said that Lochte had
"stained" the city by inventing a crime that didn't happen.

Lochte's conceit intersected with a delicate political issue,
and it made a perfect storm. His claim to NBC that men posing as
police pulled over the taxi and he heroically resisted the
robbers with a gun "pressed" to his forehead was an especially
ludicrous detail - and the very thing that drew the attention of
authorities, who know full well that anyone who defies a bandit
in Rio gets shot on the spot, and they don't leave you with your
cellphone.

In his shifting public accounts, Lochte never mentioned that
busted-up bathroom. Now put yourself in the shoes of the overrun
and pride-stung local police when they saw that video of the
Americans returning to the Olympic village a little after 6 a.m.
so cheerfully buzzed, with Lochte blithely twirling his
credential on a chain, and all of them still in possession of
their cellphones and watches.

Equal to his disrespect of the gas station owner and the police
is Lochte's disrespect to his fellow swimmers. First he
portrayed his U.S. teammates as dropping to the ground while "I
refused," as if he alone had the temerity to remain standing.
Yeah, right. This is a guy who apparently lied to his own
mother. Then he flew home, leaving the younger swimmers to deal
with the fallout. And when back in the United States, he made
moronic postings on social media, deaf to the tension they were
undergoing while detained in Rio, their passports seized.

The main quality Lochte has shown in all of this, apart from
asininity, is obliviousness. First he tweeted about his hair,
which he had dyed blue before the Games. Then on Thursday
morning, even as Conger and Bentz were in a police station and
authorities were mulling potential charges, he posted an idiotic
video of himself. It was a distortion-lensed, cartoonish video
of him babbling at his friend and fellow American swimmer
Elizabeth Beisel. Lochte eventually deleted it. Which was too
bad, because it was a perfect portrait of a halfwit.

Lochte's done as a public figure, of course. Which is probably
the most effective form of justice for someone who apparently so
craves attention. Oblivion is what he deserves.

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/olympics/ryan-lochte-is-the- dumbest-bell-that-ever-rang/article_a728622f-93f9-5fd2-b3aa-
09e4cbb9e0cc.html

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)