We personally would not do that – everybody knows that Prince George's County is not exactly a model of safety after dark, but hey, Paul Joyal seems to be a tough guy, former spy and all.

We even understand the purported motive driving him to declare the late night assault “a KGB attack.”

Hear that? “A KGB attack on a US citizen right there inside the Beltway.”

Wow – now that's huge. Let's see who did “the Russian KGB” assassinate lately in the US…

Umm…nobody exactly.

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Ever-ever? Seems to be ever, sir!

Don't take it from us – take it from a former chief of the KGB's America section Oleg Kalugin, who did a runner from Russia, and now works in DC (and we are guessing it is not the Kremlin that pays his bills now since the US refused to hand him over on an arrest warrant).

Moreover, the Kalugin guy actually knows Joyal – quite well it seems.

But back to Joyal. That the man would be pushing the “Reds under the bed” theory does not come as a surprise – never mind the police saying it’s a run-of-the-mill “criminal assault” and Oleg Kalugin, by the sound of things, agreeing.

There is one little fact about Joyal that the Associated Press mentions in its story – the man is a paid lobbyist for the government of the Republic of Georgia. And those folks are next to none when it comes to hatred of Moscow. You draw the conclusions.

But again, for the third time, we have to say Joyal and his lunacies do not interest us much. After all, every major mass media, RT included, gets a daily dose of people calling and claiming they were either abducted by aliens (last place for originality) – or that Mossad is killing them slowly with secret deadly rays (close second).

Two things bother us, though.

First, the willingness of every single major newspaper in the US to reprint the abovementioned AP wire. The story has been picked up by the heavyweight mainstream media like the NY Times, the LA Times, and the Chicago Tribune.

Everybody in the news business knows that for outlets like the NY Times to pick up a story of this type and run it on its pages, it has to be something Earth-shattering.

Like David Letterman's alleged tryst.

Or like Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom getting married.

Or like the Russian spies sneaking about the capital's suburbs.

We just seriously hope that the driving motives behind that not-so-charming uniformity of thinking is nothing more sinister than a desire to sell newspapers – Russian spies in your courtyard still sells with the older generation, so those brandishing guns should sell even better, right?

Never mind that the actual story of the assault is nearly three years old – let’s dust it off, shall we?

What bothers us seriously is the timing of a story like this.

President Obama and his young team seem to really be throwing the gauntlet at the old school Washingtonians. Their new approach seems to be bearing its first fruits – China and, yes, Russia seem to be pleasantly surprised that the White House stopped calling them all sorts of nasty names they happen to think they do not deserve.

The war in Afghanistan is being assessed realistically for the first time in eight years.

The confrontation around Iran has – hopefully – been averted without much saber-rattling.

The tension between the Young Turks of the Obama administration and the old school “My way or the highway” clan is growing every week. And not necessarily only between the two parties – there are plenty inside the Democrats who think that Obama got it totally wrong on his foreign policies.

They are the ones who totally need the stories of Al Qaeda running amok inside the US, of Chavez planning to stop selling his oil “any day now”.

And now we have those “Russian spies” in every newspaper – “…with guns, dude – in case you missed it. Call your congressman, demand they augment that defense budget again! Don't let Obama cut it down… wait, it’s already bigger than the next ten countries' combined? Okay, but so are the threats – again, did you see the one about the Russian spies shooting innocent Americans at will!?"

We just hope that not many will buy into this s@#$ again.