Saturday, August 20, 2016

He Has A Way With Words, Don't He?

Lochte puts down his pencil...
"Here. Read this." he says to his publicist.
"I like, went to this club. Was cray cray, I was so wasted. We got some dude to take us back but I had to piss so we stop at this shithole gas station. Fucking doors locked man. Fuckers aren't stopping me though, I'm murican. So I kick down that door with one unstoppable roundhouse and we go piss on the floor to show them who's boss. Wouldn't you know it, some rent a cop starts yellin some jibberish at us and waving a gun. I'm like bro, I had to piss, door had to go. He just kept going on his voodoo speak so I tossed dude a couple hundo's and bailed. Now dudes all pissed that I went and told everyone how awesome I was. Haters. So yea murica, I'm sorry bro."
"Uh, Ryan... You wouldn't mind if we edit this just a little bit? Just so it reads a little better?"
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From Lochte's Instagram account 
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Let's analyze, shall we?

[1] "I want to apologize"
He's being a weasel. The "I want to" takes the force from the "apologize."
If you want to apologize you simply apologize. Dressing it up minimizes the effect.


[2] "for my behavior last weekend —"
This phrase, followed by the dash, is crucial.
It specifies what behavior he's apologizing for. He should be apologizing for being an obsequious asshole. But, no- he apologizes for getting caught.

[a] "for not being more careful and candid in how I described the events of that early morning and "

At the same time he's putting the focus on his description of the events, not what the events actually entailed- namely, drunken buffoonery and the lies he told about it- he sneaks in that the events occurred during the "early morning" (i.e., tired, after a night of drinking) in order to justify the supposed imprecision.
But remember that he told his lies much later, including media interviews and in official testimony to police. Post-interview damage control from the PR firm was obvious instruction "Don't lie any more, and don't admit to lying."

[b] for my role in taking the focus away from the many athletes fulfilling their dreams of participating in the Olympics.
This is good. It shows a bit of awareness that people exist in the world besides himself.
But it does nothing to address his core misconduct: the vandalism and deliberately fabricated story (being stopped by a roadblock of assailants purporting to be cops who, among other things, held a gun to his head as he dismissed them with a nonchalant "whatever").
And there's the "for my role in" qualifying phrase- because he can't be taking responsibility for the actions of the group as a whole, or for media's role in shifting the focus away from the athletes.

Fuck this- the entire thing smacks of : "My PR Guy said to say this so you might have some sympathy for me."

The entire non-apology is basically a slab of lawyer-ese in attempt to appease but to avoid acceptance of any kind of guilt.

If he'd written it himself I'd suggest he go work for Hillary Clinton's campaign.
He'd fit right in.
But based on his older Instagram & Twitter content, its obvious that the apology is a carefully crafted piece from a very capable PR firm that probably already has ties to some noisome political organizations.
Probably Trump's, maybe Clinton's too.

TBG - FTMF

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