It took Sarah Palin to knock the freshly-crowned King of Pop off the front pages. As it turns out, the Queen of Conservativism is as confounding as the King of Pop.

Actually, Palin should skip the talk show route and go directly into comedy. If she could find a good cigar-toting straight man, she’d give Gracie Allen a run for her money. Two minutes into her press conference on abandoning the Alaskan governorship, my head was spinning cartoon-style. It was the most rambling speech in recent memory. Actually, makes a perfect matched set with Miss South Carolina Teen USA’s inane competition comments from 2007.

For a moment, I thought it was me, until I got weigh-in from a few media mavens. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, looking more made-over than ever, featured former McCain/Palin campaign advisor Mark McKinnon:

Watching Sara Palin is sort of like watching a moose on roller skates. It’s never particularly graceful, but it’s always riveting.

But no one ever top’s Maureen Dowd on weigh-in:

Sarah Palin showed on Friday that in one respect at least, she is qualified to be president.

Caribou Barbie is one nutty puppy.

Usually we don’t find that exquisite battiness in our leaders until they’ve been battered by sordid scandals like Watergate (Nixon), gnawing problems like Vietnam (L.B.J.), or scary threats like biological terrorism (Cheney).

She continued:

As Alaskans settled in to enjoy holiday salmon bakes and the post-solstice thaw, their governor had a solipsistic meltdown so strange it made Sparky Sanford look like a model of stability.