The Pelican Brief
Ah, an old school political thrillers, the comfort food of the post-truth era. This is less icky than Three Days of the Condor, at least she is a willing and motivated participant.
The whole plot is completely bonkers, by modern standards, it’s so quaint. The big bad unseen rich guy does a presidential campaign contribution of 4 million dollars (1% of Musk, ignoring in-kind propaganda) to elect some buffoon.
The whole thing hinges on said richie rich standing to win a billion dollars (1/1000 of Musk’s net worth) over oil drilling in Louisiana and getting cock blocked by some pelican lovers.
The case will go to the Supreme Court (pre-Shadow Docket), and the richie rich is so spooked, he he willing to hire some Arabic-sounding terrorist to assassinate two sitting Supreme Court judges so they can be replaced by his compromised president.
The whole thing unravels when some lowly lawyer at a white shoe firm accidentally copies a memo to another big shot, and a barely legal student develops the cui bono theory of who could benefit from their deaths. The reporter in the Washington Post is the hero is the whole thing, wearing out his shoe leather chasing leads. The girl is duped by the assassin, and she is saved by CIA sharpshooters (not beating the Lee Harvey Oswald accusations, I see).
This doesn’t seem to be a roman à clef, not that I know of. The president seems physically like Bush Sr, but he wasn’t a buffoon being controlled by the evil chief of staff, nor someone who could say that involving the CIA in domestic activity would be legal.
In real life, Trump picks judges from pre-approved lists from The Federalist Society. Obama gets cucked on appointing a Supreme Court judge by Mitch “Zombie” McConnell and just rolls over because it’s less than one year from the election, and Trump’s rapist justices are rammed in a week. The EPA is basically dismantled at this point, but fracking was surged even before that. There’s still no drinking water in Flint, Michigan.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.