We really do want to ignore the latest Rick Perry ads as they come in, but how can we ignore such odd scripts? (Also: we don't actually want to ignore them, ever.) Take this new one, featuring a children's cartoon, titled "Fox." It's a blanket attack against his opponents who've spent time in Congress. And it opens with this line:

The fox guarding the hen house is like asking a congressman to fix Washington: Bad idea.

Sweet hopping Christ. Do you, too, feel like you've just read the butchered output of a web translator? Again:

The fox guarding the hen house is like asking a congressman to fix Washington: Bad idea.

Maybe the message experts have data showing that viewers get more of a rise by hearing "THE FOX" first. Grr, foxes!, etc. But "Asking a congressman to fix Washington is like asking a fox to guard the henhouse" does sound much better, and more correct, and not especially complicated.

Oh, and just e-mail me about the grammatical/syntactical error I made in this post, because it's a law that you have to make one when writing about someone else's grammatical/syntactical error.