Kash Patel, our incompetent director of the FBI — good god where is Gordon Cale when you really need him — sat before Congress, grilled on his stewardship of that organization and faced questions that before this administration wouldn’t have survived a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana, play-acting his ‘simple country boy’ persona, zeroed in on the FBI’s loosening of standards for applicants, specifically that now, under Patel’s direction, the Bureau would no longer automatically disqualify for employment anyone who had engaged in bestiality.

Patel maintained that the purpose of the change in qualification was to ensure that victims of bestiality were not wrongfully excluded from services while Senator Kennedy seemed unable to process anything as a victim of bestiality except the animal that had been sexually abused. With blinders provided by the patriarchy, it appeared that both men could either not envision applicants to the FBI that were not men or that only men engaged in the terrible practice under discussion.

I have no idea if the urban legends have any basis in factual history, but for decades there has persisted the myth that in hidden and secret clubs in foreign lands — it is always in foreign lands — audiences can ‘enjoy’ watching women have sexual intercourse with animals. Mentioned most often in these tall tales are donkeys and horses. This urban legend is so well known that it appears as a plot point in the celebrated film The Godfather Part II.

Apparently, Kash Patel is so addled-brained that not only was he unprepared for this sort of questioning, he could not even muster the defense that this relaxing of qualifications on this point was to protect women who had been abused in precisely the manner depicted in the myth. Nope, that was beyond him because no one in the administration has any real intelligence and we are all paying the price for 70 million Americans who placed such idiots in positions of power.