Jeff BezosA piece of news that will bring no comfort to “the character-bashing, Jeff-Bezos hating, Amazon-vilifying tribes,” as Callie Oettinger styles them – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is on the Top Ten shortlist for TIME Magazine Person of the Year.

“We shall call it: ‘The Jeff Bezos Project’.”

Bezos may be keeping the kind of company that some of those tribes might welcome, though, with the likes of Bashar Assad, President of Syria, and Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran, also on the slate – not to mention Ted Cruz, Texas senator, or Edward Snowden. And it seems he didn’t even make it into the TIME Reader’s Poll alongside Miley Cyrus – clearly twerking still has more pull with the public than smart moves with Kindles.

Are we to assume, though, that TIME Magazine’s editorial board is also “filled with crooks” – which one TeleRead reader suggested was the only reason Bezos is not already in the dock for monopolistic abuses? TIME Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs described the selection criteria as simply “the person who has had the most impact on events this year – for better or worse” when revealing the shortlist on the Today show. So that obviously leaves room for the Bezos haters to come back on board. And I didn’t see a single wad of Amazon cash in Gibbs’s back pocket when she was onscreen.

Gibbs also listed past TIME cover boys including Adolf Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini, so the vilifying tribes can still take away the lesson that they want to. “We have done a lot of villains,” she said. Bezos, though, hardly got a mention – so maybe his villainy just hasn’t been fully unmasked yet.

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