In public, Mitt Romney will do or say anything to try to induce his party’s tea party base to vote for him. In private, he sees them for what they are: people who are as angry and frightened as a trapped animal, according to Fox News:

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett said Mitt Romney once compared the Tea Party to a ferret, according to a Time Magazine story published online.

Bennett was a three-term senator from Utah who was ousted at the state’s GOP convention by conservatives. The Time story recounts a conversation between Bennett said Romney shortly after his ouster. He said Romney related what he believed to be an apocryphal story about getting bitten by a ferret he had tried to rescue from a dishwasher.

“Mitt said the Tea party people are like that ferret in the dishwasher,” he said in the Time Magazine report. “They’re so frightened and angry, they’ll even bite Bob Bennett, who’s trying to get the country out of this mess.”

The story was adapted from “The New New Deal,” a book written by Michael Grunwald.

Bennett’s office did not respond to calls seeking comment. Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul did not confirm or deny Romney made the comments.

But why a ferret? And how would a ferret become trapped in a dishwasher? And if there were a ferret trapped in a dishwasher, is it plausible that Romney — a man who is famous for the cruel act of keeping his sick Irish setter trapped in a kennel on the roof his car during a trip from Massachusetts to Canada — would try to rescue him?

Metaphorically speaking, of course, Romney is not trying to rescue the tea party from their fear and anger. He is stoking it in order to use it for his political advantage, as he did today when he pandered to the birthers at a campaign stop by making the point that no one had ever asked to see his birth certificate.