Not too long ago, Matt’s Mom came home to find that her husband had killed himself, knowing that this time he was not going to redeem the relationship. She threatened divorce and this time she had meant it, and he knew it.

I don’t want to draw similarities between this family’s personal troubles and John McCain, but I know that women often stay in abusive relationships because they feel they can change their husband. In some cases the husbands will do things, buy things, say things that will keep their wives coming back. In the most heinous cases, these abusive spouses create an environment of fear and defenselessness so great that the wives are conditioned into believing they will be worse off it they leave rather than stay and take the abuse.

Unfortunately, in this election, Conservatives have become the woman in an abusive relationship with John McCain. After McCain locked up the nomination we tried our best to forgive McCain for his past mistakes on tax cuts, immigration, campaign finance, his constant reaching out to the left. He spoke to us at CPAC and we welcomed him, we told ourselves it will be different, he will change.

When the media tried to smear him with some illegitimate unfounded claim of an affair with a lobbyist, we rallied to his side.

We’ve had to set aside many, many of our Conservative principles in order to accept McCain as our nominee. We’ve reached out time and again, we’ve tried to support him, we’ve tried to look past the areas we don’t agree on. And in some cases, McCain showed promise, he reached out to us and told us he would be a strong military leader, bringing victory to our troops in Iraq. He promised to reign in spending, make the tax cuts permanent, stop earmarks and rebuild our party. Like battered women in an abusive relationship, we came back to him.

And now McCain has done it again. After sweet talking us with Iraq and government spending, free market solutions to health care and housing, he got angry and lashed out at us. He decided to go on an environmental tour, touting industry breaking, freedom ending, liberty crushing big government regulation, big government solutions to a false threat of climate change.

Will we forgive him this time? Will we go back to him and continue the cycle in this abusive relationship? Or will we pack up and leave? If we do that, will we be better off than if we stay? We Conservatives have some tough decisions to make.

What, with a tanking economy, a faltering war in Afghanistan, a saber-rattling Iran, a meltdown in Lebanon, an oil crisis and a screwed-up medical system, there was such a shortage of issues that he just HAD to make global warming a center-piece? The one issue guaranteed to worry business supporters, small-government conservatives and much of the rest of the Republican base? The one issue which will do the most to remind us of past betrayals?

I struggle to find an adequate illustration to describe him. He’s a self-saboteur setting up himself the bomb. As the saying goes, all his political base are belong to us. He should try and remember that.

To really mix metaphors, John McCain is like a kamikaze toreador who can’t help but goad the Republican base. He drives himself to ever-riskier feats of political peril, apparently to please his adoring media audience. Sure, John Stewart will continue tossing him flowers, but if McCain keeps it up, Republicans are likely to give him the horns.

John’s my candidate, however, so I’m gonna give him a nickel’s worth of free advice, courtesy of Jim Croce:

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim your base.