BTW showed: Eagles' nest turned lions' den.

Showing once again that he is a sociopath with no sense of shame, Sheriff Bill Smith showed up at the candidates' forum, clearly expecting to be warmly received. Not. There was a standing-room-only crowd well before the 7:00 o'clock starting time. The crowd included about 25 to 30 CCSO employees - no doubt secretly curious to see what their soon-to-be-new-boss had to say. BTW's first clue that it was not going to be his night occurred in the minutes just before the thing started. "Ol' Bill Smith" was working the front row of voters, shaking hands and making small talk. Then he came to local attorney and member of The Cumberland three, Jim Stein. When Smith had the temerity to stick his hand out to Stein, Stein's response, in a voice clearly intended for the whole room to hear, was something along the lines of "Are you crazy? I'm not going to shake your hand - you tried to put me in jail!" Smith lamely professed that no, it was Ben Jenkins who had tried to have him put into jail. Stein's response was "You're a damned liar!" Smith made one more attempt to feign innocence in the plot against The Cumberland Three. Stein even more vehemently thundered again "You're a damned liar!!" Smith, clearly shaken, moved on. The night did not get any better for Big Thug Willie. The largely hostile audience,via written questions asked by moderator Ed Clary, peppered Smith with questions about his much publicized mis-and malfeasnace in office. He was asked if it was true that he hauled inmates to Charleston to do reovation work on his ex-wife's home. Smith's response: Yeah, but they all volunteered - and it was to modify the house to make it more accessible to his quadraplegic son, Blake. That was the first of several times that he was to bring up his "quadraplegic son." When questioned about why he did not fire Wesley Walker immediately, Smith retorted that the only thing Walker was guilty of was being Fairly Cisco's son-in-law and that the only reason he eventually fired him was because of "all that mess cooked up by the Georgia Times-Union." At one point in touting his recurrent theme that the GTU was the source of all of his problems, Smith invoked Gordon jackson's name and refverred to him as "that mudslinger." I'm confident that Gordon was in the audience. There were many more questions for Smith about the whole range of his now well known misdeeds. He, of course, had excuses for all of them. When asked about his repeated use of inmates' labor on private properties, Smith pointed out that there just happened (right!) to be two wheelchair-bound folks in the audience for whom the inmates had built wheelchair ramps. Both Tommy Gregory and Rich Gamble were there. Neither really attacked Smith directly. There was really no need as the audience was doing an excellent job of that for them. Curiously, at one point - in a seeming non sequiter - Smith blurted out that he had once fired an employee for "disloyalty" to him. Speculation is that he might have been taking a shot at Gregory. Oh, that reminds me: when asked if it was true that he had subjected those employees to "voice stress" test to see which ones had been talking to the GBI and FBI, Smith said that why, yes, he had, but only in an effort to make sure that said employees were telling the truth to investigators! Oh, please! My reporter tells me that the questions for the tax commissioner candidates were rather sparse. Beth Soles was on top of her game: Pat Smith, not so much. Any other eye-witness reports out there? Put them into comments. Oh, by the way, the T.V. Camden camera was there. Watch for it later this week on cable.