But … I thought they were friends. Well, acquaintances. Sort of:

She had spent most of her time [on election day] ensconced at the Fox television studios, though she managed to squeeze in a jog in Central Park — which she promptly chronicled on Twitter: “Beautiful!” Also at the studios was her fellow Fox News contributor Karl Rove, who had recently questioned in a British newspaper whether Palin’s new reality TV series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” made her appear Oval Office-worthy. The building was abuzz over what would ensue when the two would inevitably bump into each other. The moment came after Palin finished a segment with the anchor Bret Baier and saw Rove lingering stageside with Brit Hume, a Fox colleague, holding a well-marked copy of “Alaska for Dummies” — a prop clearly intended to mollify Palin. She laughed, used her phone’s camera to take a picture of Rove with the book, traded brief hellos and then left the studio without mentioning Rove’s earlier comment.

The clip’s unclear, actually. At first it sounds like he’s telling her to man up and stop whining, but then, perhaps thinking better of that, he shifts his aim to her famously devoted supporters. Not the first time this week that a prominent Republican’s accused her of being thin-skinned, either. In the same NYT piece quoted above, Mary Matalin’s quoted as saying, “She gives as good as she gets. But I don’t know her well enough to know if she’s developed the thick skin you need to be endlessly resilient, the way Reagan could take things for decades and let them roll off his back.”

In fact, this isn’t even the first time this week that a Fox News commentator has thrown a few jabs at her vis-a-vis her show. I guess the 2012 primary season really, truly is upon us. Exit question: On a RINO scale of one to 10, with one being Jim DeMint and 10 being Lisa Murkowski, where does this segment leave Rove? (Exit answer: 12.)