Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen likens colleagues like Ilhan Omar to cats and says "The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter." - Hallo friendsINFO TODAY, In the article you read this time with the title Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen likens colleagues like Ilhan Omar to cats and says "The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter.", We have prepared this article for you to read and retrieve information therein. Hopefully the contents of postings Article economy, Article health, Article hobby, Article News, Article politics, Article sports, We write this you can understand. Alright, good read.

Title : Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen likens colleagues like Ilhan Omar to cats and says "The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter."
link : Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen likens colleagues like Ilhan Omar to cats and says "The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter."

Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen likens colleagues like Ilhan Omar to cats and says "The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter."

I'm reading "'Like herding cats': Pelosi struggles to unify Democrats after painful fight over anti-Semitism" (WaPo).

I know Steve Cohen is wielding the old cliché, It's like herding cats, but I thought it was completely unacceptable these days to equate persons of color with animals. (Ask Roseanne.) And look how bad this is:

“Being a speaker — especially on the Democratic side — is like herding cats,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.). “. . . The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter. Once the cats understand that, it’ll get better.”

He's emphasizing the physical functions — including excretion — and he's subtly threatening Omar and others. It would be crude to just come out and say, She needs to know her place and not speak so loudly and forcibly, but Cohen goes beyond that. He visualizes her as a cat, and, within that visualization, verbal expression becomes eating and defecating. Omar is brusquely informed that she'll be treated like an animal, disciplined by depriving her of her bodily needs, until she "understands" who's in charge here. That's demeaning. And it's revealing. Is that how you think of power?

"Like herding cats" was once a fresh enough notion to be funny, but it's a corny cliché these days. Its triteness is probably why Cohen felt comfortable calling Omar an animal. But he didn't glide past it. He stopped for the full visualization, complete with water and food bowls and a litter box. He meant to demean and diminish — in an offhanded, folksy-cutesy way.

When was this expression new, I wonder? The (unlinkable) OED traces it to the mid-80s:

transitive. colloquial (orig. and chiefly U.S.). to herd cats: used in similative expressions to suggest the unwieldiness or unfeasibility of an undertaking, esp. a managerial or organizational task, as like herding cats ( as hard as herding cats, etc.): extremely difficult to accomplish; unmanageable, futile.

1986 National Jrnl. 3 May 1062 Yerxa will have to continue to juggle the divergent views of the subcommittee members, a task he said ‘can be like trying to herd cats’.
1988 MIS Q. 12 65 At a recent academic meeting, an academic administrator stated that managing an academic department was akin to herding cats.

I was also curious about how Muslims regard cats. This felt important as I tried to assess the severity of the insult to Omar. Here: Wikipedia has an article, "Islam and cats":

The domestic cat is a revered animal in Islam. Admired for its cleanliness as well as for being loved by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the cat is considered "the quintessential pet" by Muslims...

One of Muhammad's companions was known as Abu Hurairah (literally: "Father of the Kitten") for his attachment to cats. Abu Hurairah claimed that he had heard Muhammad declare that a woman went to Hell for starving a female kitten and not providing her with any water.... According to legend, Abu Hurairah's cat saved Muhammad from a snake. In gratitude, Muhammad stroked the cat's back and forehead, thus blessing all cats with the righting reflex. The stripes some cats have on their foreheads are believed to mark the touch of Muhammad's fingers.

The American poet and travel author Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) was astonished when he discovered a Syrian hospital where cats roamed freely.... Edward William Lane (1801–1876), a British Orientalist who resided in Cairo, described a cat garden originally endowed by the 13th-century Egyptian sultan Baibars, whose European contemporaries held a very different attitude towards cats, eating them or killing them under papal decrees.... [C]ats were valued by the paper-based Arab-Islamic cultures for preying on mice that destroyed books. For that reason, cats are often depicted in paintings alongside Islamic scholars and bibliophiles. The medieval Egyptian zoologist Al-Damiri (1344–1405) wrote that the first cat was created when God caused a lion to sneeze, after animals on Noah's Ark complained of mice.

Thus Article Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen likens colleagues like Ilhan Omar to cats and says "The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter."

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