He complains that Sarah Palin won’t come on his show, but Bill O’Reilly of Fox News has mentioned Palin in no fewer than 664 segments since she broke onto the national stage in 2008.

Sean Hannity, who this week did a puff interview with Palin, has featured 411 Palin segments. On the left, Keith Obermann has mentioned Palin on 345 shows, and Rachel Maddow on 183 programs.

The massive exposure has caused Washington Post scribe Dana Milbank, who has written about Palin in 42 columns, to admit that he has a “Sarah Palin problem.” Milbank is going cold turkey, at least for 28 days.

“I hereby pledge that, beginning on February 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin — in print, online or on television — for one month,” Milbank wrote Friday. “Furthermore, I call on others in the news media to join me in this pledge of a Palin-free February.

“With enough support, I believe we may even be able to extend the moratorium beyond one month, but we are up against a powerful compulsion, and we must take this struggle day to day.”

A Lenten fast is usually preceded by Fat Tuesday feasts. In Palin’s case, she’s giving two major speeches in Nevada next week — notably a gig with pro-gun activists of Safari Club International — coinciding with President Obama’s State-of-the-Union speech.

Milbank talks, seriously, of a “co-dependency” developing, in which Palin has been “indulging the news business’s endless desire for conflict, tweeted provocative nuggets that would help us keep her in the public eye . . .”

The result is that the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee is getting more coverage than Vice President Joe Biden, even on a week when the veep visited Afghanistan and Iraq.

Exposure has not helped Palin of late. She gets a lowest-ever 38 percent approval rating in the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found only 30 percent approval of Palin’s reaction to the Tucson shootings, and 46 percent disapproval.

The negatives have even been noticed on Fox, where Palin works as a pundit. Bill O’Reilly and rightist political operative Dick Morris did a segment earlier this week, blaming the media that Palin has so assiduously fed.

Establishment Republican conservatives (and potential presidential rivals), Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty, have delivered discreet criticism of Palin’s pronouncements. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote last Sunday that it’s time for the press to “stop acting as if she’s the most important conservative in America.”

“I am not going to sit down. I am not going to shut up,” Palin said Monday on Hannity’s show.

Milbank has a point, of course. Huffington Post had no fewer than 19 Palin mentions on a single day last week. Milbank notes that Politico carried 96 Palin items in the past month alone.

But Palin is on record saying she is pondering a presidential run? Will Milbank release himself and fellow reporters from the-pledge if she shows up in Iowa or meets with New Hampshire Republicans?

Strange Bedfellows is pondering Milbank’s modest proposal.