BURNING QUESTION ANSWERED: YES, PALIN IS SHREWDER THAN BOBBY JINDAL!

Well, that's all I need to know. I guess for this we should just stage a coup and make her president by fiat:

...The former Alaskan governor showed up on "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" to trade barbs -- of sorts -- with actor William Shatner.

The iconic "Star Trek" captain has made several appearances on the late-night talker in recent months, mocking Palin's speeches and tweets via her Twitter page by reading them as beat poetry.

Friday night had the 78-year-old Emmy winner parodying Palin's recent tome, "Going Rogue."

... Palin, who has been touring the country to promote her book, came out on stage and turned the tables -- making poetry out of lines from the original Captain Kirk's 2008 autobiography, "Up Till Now."

... The gag scored laughs, and both Shatner and Palin departed the stage holding hands....

I said back in February that Bobby Jindal should acknowledge the "Kenneth the Page" ribbing he'd been getting aftyer his Obama speech rebuttal by just making a joke of it on TV. He didn't. So, whoop-de-doo -- now we know Palin's shrewder than Jindal. To me that's a pretty low bar, but the usual sweaty-palmed Palin groupies -- Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times, Scott Johnson of Power Line -- are treating the bit as a television triumph for the ages. It isn't. It was boilerplate schtick. Palin had the savvy to go for it (and, as the Arts Beat blog of The New York Times implies, the catty desire to slip the shiv into O'Brien's far more successful time-slot competitor, David Letterman, whom she's still snubbing), but it was nothing special.