I couldn’t agree more with this take on Matt Lauer’s interview with Ryan Lochte last night. Make no mistake, this post will conclude our Ryan Lochte coverage for the 31st Olympiad, but I continue to feel the need to defend one of America’s biggest douchebags.

Lochte showed up for his interview with Lauer with his hair dyed back to a natural color, clean-shaven, and looking like a low-level securities trader on Wall Street. Almost unrecognizable from the version of himself we saw animatedly tell Billy Bush about his late-night encounter with fake cops at a Brazilian gas station one week earlier, Lochte, well-coached on how to answer Lauer’s questions, channeled his inner Marco Rubio in the repetitiveness with which he expressed his regret, often struggling to grasp words from the shallow depths of his 100-word vocabulary to explain himself. To say that Lochte is a stupid lunkhead would be an understatement… which makes our rush to ostracize him even more reprehensible, an effort now led by NBC, the network which employs Brian Williams.

The crux of Lauer’s tough line of questioning – tougher than he employed with Williams – was about Lochte’s initial insistence that he was robbed, which runs counter to the now widely accepted view that Lochte and the other swimmers merely struck a deal with two gun-wielding rent-a-cops while seated, execution-style, at the end of a car wash that looked like it would surely scratch your car. I get the fact that we should all roll our eyes and wag are judgmental fingers at Lochte for embellishing certain details of the incident, but the fact remains that this was no business deal, despite how much Lauer and the rest of the public, searching for deeper meaning in a silly, and somewhat dangerous, he-said, she-said event, want us to believe it was. At worst, Lochte and the other swimmers were drunken idiots who, probably upon discovering locked bathroom doors, pissed behind a gas station and, in one of those spontaneous outbursts of inebriation, knocked down a sign affixed to the backside of a gas station. Stupid? Yes. Foolish, especially when you consider that you’re high-profile athletes representing your country? Absolutely. Worthy of having a gun pointed at you and being held for self-ransom by a couple of overzealous thug security guards operating in a seemingly lawless environment? No, not even close. This was not business deal, a notion Lauer repeatedly tried to pin Lochte down on. Rather, it was a hostile extortion attempt in a shithole country where such things are apparently the norm, and inexplicably the American public consciousness has accepted this as being totally OK. No one has bothered to ask, “Hey, is it pretty fucked up that those guys pulled guns on the swimmers because they broke a sign– what sort of weird, lawless mercenary-ism exists in Brazil?” Imagine how different the story would be if Lochte was black. Sure, maybe he wouldn’t have had his heroic model shots on the cover of the NY tabloids, but the reaction to the actions of the Brazilian security guards would be wholly different. Our society has become acutely aware of the dangers of the use of excessive force by police, so whether the Lochte incident happened here or in Brazil, the public reaction to two security guards pulling weapons on a few drunk guys over a broken sign would be entirely different. American hero Ryan Lochte held at gunpoint in apparent racist response to mild vandalism.

And this only became a story because Brazilians authorities (and the IOC) misled the public. Had they not come out and immediately said “this didn’t happen,” the moderate embellishments on the part of Lochte would likely just be footnotes in the saga. Oh that Lochte is a dumbass. It’s crazy that everyone, including Lauer, seems to ignore the fact that Brazilian authorities said that the swimmers trashed a bathroom and got into an altercation with security guards (none of which happened), and didn’t acknowledge the fact that a weapon was pulled until about 30 minutes into their laughable press conference last week. If anything, their version of events – with the benefit of surveillance video! – was more incorrect and embellished than Lochte’s. For his part, Lochte, who struggles to express himself sober, was ill-equipped to give an account of a hazy event while still shaking off the effects of what was likely his first binge-drinking session in months. I’m not so sure he could even accurately describe the process of brushing his teeth without some incorrect phrasing. So from the moment he opened his mouth, he was destined to lose the ensuring PR battle with a corrupt country, whose coerced version of events we’ve seemingly accepted as the truth.

Lochte sucks. But I’ll choose to be on the side of the drunken American who blew off some steam rather than the thug Brazilian security guards who held him at gunpoint over a broken sign. USA! USA!