Kudos to Bernie Sanders for stating the obvious about the billionaire weasel responsible for the ongoing decline of a top-tier newspaper:

Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie and $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding and give his wife a $5 million ring, please don’t tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I discussed events leading up to the firings while watching the most boring Super Bowl ever. (Not even Bad Bunny could save it.)

Bezos bought the Post in 2013 and seemed serious about positioning the newspaper for future success, but his support slacked off in a big way, especially after Donald Trump started threatening media institutions during his re-election campaign.

A yes man was hired to be the Post‘s new publisher and another yes man for opinions editor. More than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions soon after the newspaper withdrew its endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. Bezos cozied up to Trump and contributed big money to his inauguration. The Post‘s editorials and news stories began tilting to the right. Many talented reporters and editors and columnists jumped ship. The suspicion grew that Bezos had become Trump’s lapdog in order to ensure his other business interests wouldn’t be sabotaged by our criminal-in-chief.

The biggest blow to Bezos’s credibility came just last week when 300 Post employees were laid off as part of a so-called restructuring effort.

I told Swamp Rabbit a tiny sliver of the Amazon founder’s wealth could have saved those jobs. He replied, “Bezos is a businessman. Maybe he decided it was time to stop backing a loser.”

I noted that Bezos is the guy who chose the motto “Democracy dies in darkness” to assure readers that the Post would never allow outside forces to undermine its independence and integrity. I thought of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, in which Charles Foster Kane (a fictionalized William Randolph Hearst) buys an ailing newspaper and issues a grandiose “declaration of principles” that he betrays when his power corrupts him.

“You ain’t got time for that lofty shit,” Swamp Rabbit said. “F&%# Bezos. You should just take care of what you got and count your blessings.”

He was right. I have a shack in Bog Water Homes, reliable running shoes, a cabinet full of Triscuits, and Thoughts and Prayers, my highly civilized cats. But that’s no excuse. What if everybody decided to simply ignore the fact that a coterie of smug billionaires is working with the MAGA crowd to weaken our democracy from within?

“You sound like one of them conspiracy kooks,” Swamp Rabbit said. And then, after a pause, “But I ain’t saying you’re wrong.”

Footnote: Kane ran a media empire. Bezos has only one newspaper, but he runs a retail empire bigger than anything Kane could have imagined.