Helsinki horror stories: “How bad is it? So bad that …”

<![CDATA[

– News from elsewhere covered by Quincy Quarry News.

Helsinki horror stories: “How bad is it?”

“So bad that …”

From Quincy Quarry’s media brethren at MASSterList.com comes as good a wide ranging summary of local commentary on President Trump’s recent summit in Helsinki with his Russian President Vladimir Putin.

From Russia with rubles?
CCN Money image

“Even though the president yesterday was backtracking from his controversial Helsinki comments, there was no shortage of local reactions from pols and bleacher-seat pundits over the president’s original remarks that were seen as exonerating Russia of any election-year meddling.”

“How bad is it?” writes the Herald’s Joe Battenfeld of Trump’s Helsinki debacle.  “So bad that Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Lively, best known for blaming the Holocaust on gay Nazis, gave it ‘two thumbs up.’  So bad that Governor Charlie Baker himself had to come out of his shell to condemn it.”

Verklempt?
An Angela Rowlings/Boston Herald image

“Speaking of Baker, he initially said yesterday that it’s important that the election-interference investigation of Robert Mueller continue – but that he didn’t know what was said in Helsinki,” reports Shira Schoenberg at MassLive.  

But, as Battenfeld writes, the governor later condemned the president’s remarks as “disgraceful.”

But State Representative Geoff Diehl, who is running for the U.S. Senate in the GOP primary, thinks the Helsinki summit went just swell, reports Mary Whitfill at the Patriot Ledger.

Took a tumble …
A Columbia Pictures still image

The Globe’s Renée Graham agrees more with Governor Charlie Baker: “What happened Monday at their post-summit press conference in Helsinki was nothing short of an American president, in the presence of a tyrant, collapsing like a cheap beach chair.”

The Globe’s Scot Lehigh writes that things sure are getting “stinky” for Trump.

Meanwhile, United States House Representative Jim McGovern is pressing House Republicans to fund grants that help protect U.S. election systems from foreign hackers, Schoenberg reports at MassLive.

Ah, yet another anti-Trump protest, this one over his Helsinki statements …

We must be suffering from a variation of the Trump fatigue that the Globe’s Annie Linskey was writing about the other day, for, even though we’re as shocked as others about the president’s Helsinki performance, we really can’t get worked up by the fact that left-wing groups, including MoveOn, Daily Kos and Need to Impeach, etc., are planning vigils this evening at the State House and across the country to protest Trump’s statements, as SHNS’s Michael Norton (pay wall) reports.  It’s just, well, the same old outraged protesters.

As Linskey wrote: “There have been nationwide protests on a slew of topics: marches to oppose Trump’s inauguration and to support women’s rights, marches to oppose the Muslim ban, marches to support gun control, amid a spate of mass killings, and marches to oppose Trump’s now recanted policy of separating immigrant families arriving at the southern border.  It’s a lot of outrage and an awful lot of protesting.”

Andrew Bacevich, in a Globe opinion piece this morning, is advising the left to calm down a bit: “If there is a paranoid style in evidence in American politics today, it is proliferating like kudzu among anti-Trumpers who have allowed their understandable dismay with the president to become an all-consuming mania.”

Quincy Quarry disclaimer

]]>