Matt Taibbi has a hilarious/penetrating post mortem on the election in Rolling Stone - a keeper for calling Palin “Pinochet in heels,” among other references.

But he notes how the fatal flaw in the McCain-Palin campaign might have been putting oil and water on the same ticket:

Sarah Palin would have been a brilliant choice as a presidential nominee — and she will be, in 2012, when she leads the inevitable Republican counter-revolution against Obama’s presidency. She’s a classic divide-and-conquer politician, an unapologetic Witch Hunter and True Believer with a gift for whipping up the mob against the infidel. In a way that even George W. Bush never was, she is Karl Rove’s wet dream, the Osama bin Laden of soccer moms, crusading against germs, communism, atheism and other such unclean elements strictly banned by American law.

Palin is exactly the kind of all-or-nothing fundamentalist to whom the career of John McCain had long existed as a kind of sneering counterargument. Up until this year, McCain had firmly rejected the emotional imperatives implicit in Bush-Rove-Gingrich conservatism, in which the relentless demonizing of liberals and liberalism was even more important than policy. While other Republicans were crusading against gay marriage in 2004, McCain bashed a proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment, calling it “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans.” While the president and other Republicans wrapped their arms around the Falwells of the world, McCain blasted those preachers as “agents of intolerance.” He talked of seeing the hand of God when he hiked in the Grand Canyon, but insisted loudly that he believed in evolution. He even, for Christ’s sake, supported a ban on commercial whaling. If there’s anything that a decent Republican knows without being told, it’s that whales are a liberal constituency.

But McCain didn’t care. Back then, his political survival didn’t depend on keeping voters artificially geeked up on fear and hatred for Mexicans or biology teachers or other such subversives.

Once it did, he was toast.

I like the line, too, about the “emotional imperatives implicit” in modern conservatism - exactly right.