Young, stormy and driven as an adolescent, my reaction to striking out in baseball was to curse the bat for conspiring against me, and in the field, when the ball bounced between my then-scrawny legs, I blamed my dusty mitt, and often slammed it to the ground as a hated adversary.

But then I outgrew that, mostly, and came to realize that avoiding such embarrassments was a matter of my own self-development, not the crafty designs of inanimate objects.

And now, just when I thought there was no blaming a mitt…comes Mitt!

Yes, there is something devilish at work within this Mitt, something that taunts, tweaks and bedevils its owners – like Peter Lorre’s classic “The Beast With Five Fingers” or Devon Sawa’s “Idle Hands” – compelling them to spill hundreds of millions of dollars down a bathtub drain. Down, down, down like all that Lehman stock, all that wasted money on a dismally-failing electoral campaign.

The latest Mitt-management fiasco rang all too familiar with us Virginians, thinking it almost impossible after George Allen’s career-ending “macaca moment” in the 2006 Senate election that such a thing could ever happen that way again.

But, just as with Allen in 2006, Romney operated on the assumption, Kate Middleton-style, that no one was recording him in a private, intimate moment as he played to the lowest common denominator in a room of greed-driven right wing dolts.

No, no, Mitt! Don’t do that to we who own you! You are ruining everything!

All those prep sessions, all those years trying and trying to present himself as a “man of the people,” gone! Damn it, he said what he really thought, just like Todd Akin in Missouri, and someone caught him at it. What could be worse?

Admittedly, it’s tough when you are an agent of the one percent of one percent of uber-rich Americans trying to win an electoral majority. You have to focus on all those jobs resulting from giving tax cuts to and removing regulations from the super-rich, all those fictitious jobs. You have to focus on a tightly-wound tissue of lies that projects upon your opponent all the draconian social devastation that you, yourself, are planning for.

Let the sinister force animating this Mitt stray from such a narrowly-scripted path, and he wreaks chaos and self-destruction, like he did in England, like he caused when he spoke about Russia, and when he weighed in on the Middle East.

I disagree with columnist David Brooks when it comes to Mitt Romney. Brooks says he is a nice man running a depressingly inept campaign. I don’t think Romney is nice. He comes across that way because in the elitist circles of politics and the media, where arch enemies on policy matters often sip martinis together, he is nice because he is polite.

But people like him qualify for especially-predatory Bain Capital-style “reorganization” efforts by demonstrating they can tear wings off parakeets without flinching, nail cats to garage doors and set their tails on fire, or punch out long-hairs on the school yard without hesitation or remorse.

Romney suffers from a severe case of “empathy deficit,” also known as a “sociopathic personality,” which is why he was a good corporate raider. Bain is not a normal company, where ownership can often be compassionate and concerned for the fate of employees. It is a particular kind of entity whose success is dependent on a total disregard and disdain for employees.

When Romney had to grovel for big money at a private reception in a back room where no one was supposed to leak what’s going on, he reverted to the kind of talk the whole world now knows about. He is nasty, indifferent, willing to spare no insult against half the U.S. population, while publicly presuming to be the leader of all the people.

Allen used one racial slur in 2006, and it ruined him in a race he was supposed to win. It was he, not John McCain, who was being groomed for the GOP presidential role in 2008, until that fateful moment.

But Romney’s transgression was much worse, an extended, calculated slur against fully half of America.