A great number of people, mostly liberals, had fun with the comments of Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone a couple of months ago, when he complained that Pope Francis’s rhetoric about the rich and the poor might offend the tender sensibilities of wealthy contributors to the Catholic Church. I was not as offended by Langone’s comments as a lot of other people were. This is America, after all, and there are many legitimate political points of view here. Even if Ken Langone wanted to be an anarcho-capitalist master-of-the-universe don’t-tread-on-me ultra-Ayn-Randian Tea Partier, that would be his call, and it wouldn’t necessitate the conclusion that he’s a bad guy, or even especially selfish. The rich create jobs, after all, they make the poor better off, etc., etc. (And, in the case of Ken Langone, it’s not just a generalized social benefit of economic investment by wealthy people that indicates he’s a good guy. He specifically is very generous to many causes, including St. Patrick’s Cathedral here in NYC.)
But now it turns out that this same Ken Langone . . . is the head of Republicans for Cuomo, supporting New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s run for reelection. For the record, that’s the same ultra-liberal Andrew Cuomo who claims pro-lifers don’t belong in our state.
To summarize, then: The pope is too left-wing for this guy, but Andrew Cuomo is totally jake with him.
Maybe politics has always been this dizzyingly complicated, and it’s just the massive volume of 24/7 information about it that makes it seem more complicated these days?