The American legal system did something right. It gets a cookie.

I've been told that the number one way to get fired nowadays is to blog on the job. Well, ha! Take this corporate America. Yeah.

So Jack Thompson's trial wrapped up recently. I really hate to talk about this guy because he is the kind of media whore who gets off on attention, and bolsters his reputation on attention. It doesn't matter what kind of attention, and with the absolutely pathetic state of the Internet and its users, getting good attention is almost impossible nowadays - not that it matters anyway. You'd have to prove your ancestry to Jesus and build skis out of the True Cross and make a cape out of the shroud of Turin and win the Olympic ski slope for the USA, crushing the Chinese, cover the world in solar panels mocked up to look like the stars and stripes, and then go and feed a bunch of babies in The People's Republic of the Congo all while humming "Amazing Grace" and the national anthem out of each side of your mouth and winning on American Idol to get any kind of good attention on the webs, and you'd still be hated and mocked just for doing so damn well for yourself you bloody overachiever.

::breathes::

Anyhow, Game Politics probably has the best coverage, and I mean that as a flat-out compliment despite my altercations with them. He is guilty of almost 31 counts of misusing, misrepresenting, or flat out breaking Florida Bar Association laws, which all falls under the title of Professional Misdemeanor, mostly in non-video game related matters. This makes it all the more sweeter because it proves that aside from an insane right-wing weirdo who touted the "fact" that pretend violence is much worse than real violence, the guy is a flat out incompetent lawyer even when, to put it one way, out of his element.

This also is not the first time Thompson has been slapped in the balls by the courts. In 2005, his pro hac vice licence (Latin for "for this event," meaning a lawyer can sit in or consult on a case with which they are otherwise unaffiliated) was revoked during the trial of Devin Moore. Moore shot two police officers and a dispatcher supposedly because Grand Theft Auto told him it was okay. Thompson, naturally, jumped all over this in the same manner a squirrel would jump on the last acorn on Earth, which resulted in Judge Moore revoking the licence and stating, "Mr. Thompson's actions before this Court suggest that he is unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting practice in this state [Alabama]."

My favorite charge he was found guilty of is, taken from Escapist Magazine, "Using means that have no other purpose than to embarrass, delay or burden a third person." I think that describes the man to a capital T.

But we have to remember that this is America, and as such it is pretty difficult to get a news camera pointed at you (You Tube notwithstanding.) It is even more difficult when you are the kind of genetic freak who does not speak in five second sound bytes and actually has something deep, meaningful, challenging, in insightful to say. Thompson is the same model of person as Madonna or Oscar Wilde, not to say that he is a talented singer or a wonderful writer, but he has a knack for attracting the media. Television and particularly the Internet do not provide any kind of quality control with the information the beam into your forehead. Thompson has been around for a while now, ever since Columbine made it cool to scapegoat pop culture and popular media for the sake of terrible parenting and to avoid making upper-middle class white folks look bad. He is only one man representing what has come to be a rather accepted point of view: games, music, and movies turn your pink-skinned virgin-eared bright-eyed Christian children into baby eaters.

In any case, it is still a victory. It is a victory not so much for the fact that this psycho can no longer practice law, but that it peels back the veil of righteousness and authority that the Jesus loving, gay bashing, protect whitey crowd wears just a little more. It shows that one of the leading voices in the angry-mob-pitchfork-and-torches march on games and music is nothing more than a slimy immature lying son of a bitch that even Florida will not defend.