Evaluating Ann Coulter

An individual employee of Microsoft inadvertently posted the employee's own opinion of Ann Coulter on the company's Facebook page:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/microsoft-accidentally-tweets-anti-ann-coulter-message-to-nearly-300000-followers/

Shocking! Disgraceful! Coulter's reported umbrage with being compared to Robert Reich's granddaughter even prompts me to reconsider a haiku I once published comparing Coulter with my late lamented cat Bisquit.

The difference I highlighted, back then, was that Bisquit was capable of being a mother. The similarities began with both Coulter and Bisquit being slim, blonde, and annoying, but the comparison really began with the fact that Bisquit reported news to me. When anything unusual had happened around the Cat Sanctuary, Bisquit would in fact point to the scene (with her nose); sometimes she even seemed to be trying to pantomime what she'd seen. While I wouldn't have expected a cat to be able to remember or report much, Bisquit was not an ordinary cat, and I was able to verify (by tracks in fresh snow) that one episode she reported had been even more dramatic and unexpected than Bisquit was able to show. Of course, most cats reenact hunts and fights; Bisquit didn't seem able to think of a way to pantomime the effects of weather damage, which she also faithfully pointed out to me, year after year, when it occurred.

Whether Bisquit ever understood the concept of reading or writing, I'm not sure. (The most that's been seriously claimed that some cats have been taught, usually with difficulty, to notice the difference between printed words like "food" and "sand" on identical containers. I'm not the one who took the time to teach a cat this idea.) Bisquit did, however, paw through at least one short book, holding down pages as if she had at least looked at each one; and she did once sneak into my office and type something on the computer, although what she typed was gibberish and I have no idea whether she imagined that what humans type on computers have anything to do with words.

Bisquit was not a Listening Cat. She seldom responded correctly to words; she seldom even listened to words--she usually meowed first. She was, however, the most actively communicative cat I've ever known. Like Ann Coulter, she often made me smile...and often made me protest, "That's not funny! That's not even cute!"

I suspected, during her lifetime, that much of what Bisquit was communicating had to do with the early death of her favorite littermate and the subsequent development that she was nobody's very favorite cat. She belonged to an extremely social cat family and received some affection from her mother, uncle, and sisters as well as her humans, but she always seemed to be upstaged by relatives who were even more adorable than she was. My Significant Other used to try to fill in the gaps, thus highlighting another resemblance between Bisquit and Ann Coulter: both were more appreciated by men than by women.

To be fair, I will say that I've appropriated more of Coulter's jokes than Bisquit's. On the other hand, Coulter wouldn't fit on my lap, doesn't work as a team with her relatives to keep the Cat Sanctuary vermin-free, and has not supplied the neighborhood with a clan of super-intelligent social kittens.