Following the Republican National Kvetch-a-Sketch, Mitt Romney announced that his first post-convention interview would be with – wait for it – Fox News. Surprised?

You might think that this press availability would be a pretty easy affair for Romney. After all, Fox is the PR division of the GOP and has been handling Romney’s promotional campaign for months. However, it didn’t take long for Romney to expose himself as nearly as incompetent an interview subject as Sarah Palin, who couldn’t name a single newspaper that she read (and considered that a “gotcha” question). Fox’s account executive …er… news anchor, Bret Baier saved a probing question for the end of his interview when he asked Romney…

“To hear several speakers in Charlotte, they were essentially saying that you don’t care about the U.S. military because you didn’t mention U.S. troops and the war in Afghanistan in your nomination acceptance speech. Do you regret opening up this line of attack, now a recurring attack, by leaving out that issue in the speech?

Notice that Baier is not asking whether Romney regrets that he failed to acknowledge and thank the American troops who are serving their country in a time of war. Baier is only asking whether Romney regrets that his omission has provided an opening for his opponents to criticize him. So it wasn’t a question about the troops at all. It was a question about the Democrats.

Nevertheless, Romney managed to utterly embarrass himself with an answer that further disregarded the troops and cast himself as even more devoid of human-like characteristics than previously thought.

“I only regret you’re repeating it day in and day out. When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list, you talk about the things that you think are important and I described in my speech, my commitment to a strong military unlike the president’s decision to cut our military. And I didn’t use the word troops, I used the word military. I think they refer to the same thing.”

So the only thing that Romney regrets is that the press has an interest in the words that he spoke in perhaps the most important speech of his life, and are seeking to understand his meaning. And if that weren’t bad enough, by his own admission Romney doesn’t think that thanking our soldiers is important, or else he would have talked about it.

Romney goes on to say that he expressed his commitment to a strong military, and that “military” and “troops” are the same thing. Actually, they’re not.

The military is a massive bureaucracy that manages various divisions of public and private enterprises engaged in defense operations and preparedness. Troops are people who train and fight and bleed and die. His context was made clear with his reference to “cut[ting] the military.” Obviously he is referring to cutting budgets, not human flesh.

This failure by Romney to draw a distinction between the two echoes his famous inarticulate insensitivity when he said that “Corporations are people, my friend.” Romney has a tendency to relate better to institutions than to mortal persons. This is further revealed in the “Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth” that is on his web site. It refers to workers as “Human Capital.” Makes your heart tingle, doesn’t it? For Romney everything is reduced to a line item on a profit and loss statement.

And this dreadfully mishandled answer was to a question from his pals at Fox News. Just wait until he has to answer questions from more neutral news organizations or those he will encounter in his debates with President Obama.