It’s strange how the writer seems to excuse themselves the cliche of saying “like a hot knife through butter” by jazzing it up. “A hot buzzsaw through a butter cow” would just make a huge mess everywhere, not get to the heart of the issue quickly. Mixing metaphors isn’t good writing, and getting them wrong makes for very poor style, but the writer (even though I enjoyed this article) seems to consider themselves a great stylist despite not thinking about the implications of this metaphoric language.

Oh damn, that's Lyttle Lytton material right there. So bad it comes back around and becomes good.

It's ambiguous, but I read it as "the prosecutor effortlessly heaped a brutal line of questioning upon the defendant," or something to that effect.

Typically bandsaws are used to process cows anyways, so it makes even less sense.

I think it's this type of butter cow being referenced

https://www.iowastatefair.org/about/butter-cow

Surely there’s a lot of competition and rush to publish news on this trial. Changing around the metaphors might not be the highest priority of any editors.

So don’t change it around. Just reject the metaphor usage entirely.

“If you don’t understand metaphors, please, just don’t use them.”