Credit to News Leader reporter Lyra Bordelon for asking Jim Wood straight up this week about the “Pete Buttplug” controversy that got Waynesboro into the national headlines back in 2023.
In the course of an interview for what was otherwise a puff piece about Wood’s re-election campaign, Bordelon made sure to get Wood, who won his 2022 race for the Ward D seat on Waynesboro City Council by 17 votes, on the record about the awful slur.
That’s A+ journalism right there.
Wood’s answer is A+ political spin.
“The record I’ve had as a councilman should erase that. [People] totally took it out of context. I have, and I don’t want to be that cliché, but I’ve got gay friends. I do. My best friend growing up is a lesbian in Atlanta, and to this day I would give her a kidney if she needed.”
There’s a lot to unpack here, obviously.
From the archives
- Jim Wood has been full of crap for years: read all about it here.
The background: the Pete Buttplug matter, in which Wood, on a podcast that he had hosted on Facebook dating back several years ahead of his election, involved Wood using the homophobic slur to denigrate Pete Buttigieg, then the Secretary of Transportation in the Biden administration, as the city was asking the Department of Transportation for grant money on an infrastructure project.
The slur was made on a podcast that Wood posted a few weeks into his term on City Council; after several weeks of public pressure aimed at getting him to resign, Wood faded into the background, and the bulk of his time as a City Council member since has seen him attending selected ribbon cuttings and otherwise sitting mute in meetings during discussions of city matters of any import.
Jim Wood has literally done nothing for four years but take up oxygen in that Ward D seat.
The people took it out of context claim is the go-to in self-induced crisis management.
Wood claimed later in the interview with Bordelon that the “whole thing was me, in an angry state, making fun of someone’s last name.”
“People can believe what they want, and they’re going to, but I’ll tell you right now, as genuinely and honestly as I can, I was making fun of his last name.”
Uh, huh.
That’s it. Just making fun of his last name.
He wasn’t being a homophobe.
Doesn’t have a homophobic bone in his body.
In fact, his best friend is a lesbian in Atlanta.
Come on, right?
Problem here for ol’ Jimmy is, on another podcast, on the eve of the 2022 election, our best friend is a lesbian in Atlanta guy made dubious claims about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, at the time the Speaker of the House.
We wrote about this extensively at the time, but obviously, this seems a good time to rehash.
Wood made the politically motivated attack on Paul Pelosi into actually having been a “domestic dispute” between Mr. Pelosi and “a male prostitute and advocate for Black Lives Matter and LGBT.”
Was that also some slip of the tongue there, Jim?
As it turns out, the perpetrator in the attack, a man named David DePape, was a COVID denier and antisemite who posted volumes online about how the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump, who broke into the Pelosi home demanding to see “Nancy.”
He wasn’t there as a male prostitute, but you knew that already.
DePape attacked Pelosi with a hammer, fracturing his skull – Wood dismissed this in the podcast as “maybe ol’ Papa Pelosi, got a case of the juicy sommeliers, and, you know, I guess we’ll see somewhere down the road, maybe after the midterm elections, maybe. I think this is something to stir a little crap, to get a little bit of attention.”
DePape is serving a life sentence for the attack, which Wood also used as fodder on his podcast for “the best dad joke I’ve heard in a while.”
“Right before that incident, you know, Nancy Pelosi, she texted Paul to say, I hope you’re not drinking and driving. And the reply was, No, I’m just staying at home getting hammered.”
That’s it; that was the “dad joke.”
Wonder what Jimmy’s lesbian best friend in Atlanta thought of the dad joke?
Answer: even people made up out of the thin air think Jim Wood is a backwoods bigot.
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Chris Graham
