Apparently, The Daily Beast, a popular liberal internet journal, has insinuated that Bob English, a contributor at EconomicPolicyJournal, ZeroHedge, and Russia Today, is  a Russian spy…

or linked to a Russian spy ring….

or  once formulated questions like a Russian spy …

or formulated questions that struck the writers at the Daily Beast as questions that – were they Russian spies – they might have asked..

Or…..well, The Beast isn’t too clear what exactly they’re claiming English is.

Which is very convenient, because it’s tres difficile to deny or refute  a claim you can’t really grasp head or tail of.

Still,  I’m all agog.

D’you mean to say that commenting at EPJ, I might have been rubbing shoulders with a bona-fide SVR (foreign intelligence) operative?

The following exchange was back in 2011, at the start of the Occupy Wall Street operation, when Bob’s career as a spy (sarcasm alert!) was dithering around so much it left him time to post long messages at EPJ:

• Reply
• 
  Lila RajivaOctober 18, 2011 at 9:31 AM

  @Bob English

  I think a French court recently upheld a conviction against Soros. Is there any way to leverage that in the US?

  Reply
• 
  Lila RajivaOctober 18, 2011 at 9:32 AM

  Ellen Brown is for the Toobin Tax…
  She should rethink this, with this information out there.

  Reply
• 
  Bob EnglishOctober 18, 2011 at 10:04 AM

  Nice usage of the word “leverage”, Lila. :->

  Soros is officially out of the trading business (but not really). He’s positioned himself against the big banks and has the activist state AG’s on his side. Who’s going to attack him? Holder? He has his own major problems and can’t afford it. The way to kick Soros in the shin is to take out Schneiderman–a la Spitzer. Unlikely to happen though. Wall St doesn’t have the clout or hootzpah it did in those days.

  I think Soros could come out of the global reset as The Big Winner. It’s really amazing to watch as it unfolds.”

   

And look here, the dastardly editor of EPJ, Bob Wenzel even lists me along with the alleged spymaster in an even more dastardly ring …..of anti-Krugmanites:

And there you have it, very poorly argued comments from the Krugmanites. A really sad group. I’ll match up the EPJ commenters over Krugmanites, any day. I’ll take, Bob Murphy, Bob English, Richard Dale Fitzgerald, Botie, Joe Nelson, Taylor Conant, Hans Palmstierna, Michael Labeit,, Andre Grillon, Joesph Fetz, Melvin Megawitz, Iris Mack, Kaarel Tamm, Christopher Kozlowski, Lila Rajiva, Capn Mike, Vviresh Amin, Zach Bush, Jaison De Montalegre, deft, Skip Oliva, Adam Munter, JFF and many, many more, over the Krugmanites any day

Good Lord.

The dangers I run on this blog…

Getting back to mother-ship Earth, Bob English has denied the rumor/innuendo/sliming/character-assassination  stoutly at EPJ, to wit:

For the record, I, Bob English, am not a spy for the Russian government (or any other).

Monday, Federal prosecutors levied criminal charges against Evgeny Buryakov, one of three Russians alleged to have engaged in espionage against the US.  Several media outlets reported the story, but Shane Harris and M.L. Nestel at The Daily Beast jumped through hoops in a vain attempt to link me and my former employer, RTTV America, to the conspiracy. “

Of course, I needn’t tell Mr. English that any statement beginning “I am not a spy” has about the same ring of conviction to the average ear  as “I am not a crook”.….as Richard Nixon found to his grief.

This is the nature of smearing on the web.

Unless you have a large media presence and hordes of fans or paid hacks to counter the spin, nothing you say can actually undo the damage. It’s more likely to make it worse. That’s been my own dismal experience.

I should add here that I know nothing whatsoever about Bob English (if that is his name) beyond what I read from his pen.

I have never met or spoken to this person, outside the comment section at EPJ.

For aught I know, he  is Putin’s right-hand man and took notes directly from Aldrich Ames.

But since I’ve had many more exchanges with the late Alexander Cockburn (CIA),  Gordon Duff (Military Intelligence), various Bazaar  Inc. (guess who?)  affiliates (some almost certainly working with intelligence),  various blog editors and owners  whom I shall not name (whom I suspect of being Pakistani, Indian, Russian or other intelligence operatives), at least one out-of-control CIA station chief (or near-abouts), and a host of sayanim, hasbara agents, agents provocateurs, trolls, and paid bashers who have plastered their admiration of me all over the net, I’m not about to pass out with worry.

Welcome to virtual reality.

When the entire web is the field of espionage and brain-washing (chiefly by the American, British, and Israeli governments), much of it done via reputable establishment mouth-pieces, corporations, government-funded software programs, spyware, and robots; when foreign lobbyists openly bribe members of Congress for “access”; when any venue of international diplomacy is riddled with bugs and cameras;  when confidential information is passed along in the halls of power like birthday cake; the fact that some writer somewhere echoed some suspected spy’s line of questioning strikes me as underwhelming in the extreme, even if proved to the hilt.

Unproven, it’s just another shade of yellow (belly) journalism.