Daze of the Jackals

An elderly janitor called Ralph arrives for his shift, pushing a cleaning cart from room to room. After trading pleasantries with a couple of office mates, Ralph starts killing everyone who crosses his path. Once Ralph has carved a path of violence through the building, he ascends to the roof, tosses a few smoke pellets onto the ground below, and vanishes into the chaos.

That’s from “Everything to know about the Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal.” The new TV series presents “an elite contract killer with his sights set on some of the world’s most powerful people.” Call it a cover of the original movie, based on the 1971 The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. He knew what the deal was.

In the early 1960s, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), opposed to Algerian independence, sought to murder General Charles de Gaulle. The OAS perceived France’s “vast bureaucracies” as a glaring weakness, giving the Jackal, their hired assassin, time to operate. The 1973 movie with Edward Fox as the Jackal, is quite faithful to the book but the real star is Michael Lonsdale as inspector Claude Lebel, by all accounts the best detective in France. As Lebel explains to Madame de Montpellier (Delphine Seyrig), “be in no doubt as to the seriousness of your position.” Jump ahead to 2024 and that warning takes on wider application.

America’s deep-state bureaucracies, including the FBI and CIA, are openly deployed against Donald Trump. The Secret Service, once part of the Treasury Department, is now under the Department of Homeland Security, putting the vile Alejandro Mayorkas in charge. On July 13, with the Secret Service on guard, the mysterious Thomas Michael Crooks, 20, was able to scale a rooftop and get off eight shots. Had Donald Trump not turned his head toward a chart, he surely would have been killed. If anybody traced a path from OAS to DHS it would be hard to blame them. As they say, truth is stranger than fiction.

De Gaulle also narrowly escaped assassination, but with Democrats comparing Trump to Hitler more assassination attempts cannot be ruled out. Meanwhile, the “most important people in the world,” targeted by Peacock’s jackal, will probably not include Republican presidents or candidates. Expect the usual suspects from leftist central casting. Best to stick with the Forsyth book and 1973 movie, directed by Fred Zinnemann. As Dobie Gray said, the original is still the greatest.

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