Mike Lupica, Monday, February 8th 2010, 4:00 AM

Now Sarah Palin comes right out and says it, that she really is thinking about running for President in 2012. She says it in the same starry-eyed way kids talk about growing up to be astronauts, but actually seems to believe it, that somehow she can go from being this kind of pinup girl for her Tea Party friends to the White House.

"I think it would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country," Palin told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday."

Now there are many, many ways Sarah Palin could help this country. Running for President will never be one of them. You listen to her long enough and actually feel yourself getting dimmer by the minute, like a dying light bulb.

If her vision and grasp of even the most basic issues - with or without cribnotes - were any lighter, you would have to tie a rock to her to keep her from floating away.

She imagines herself as some big, conservative, independent thinker. When she doesn't like Rahm Emanuel, the President's chief of staff, using the word "retards" to describe liberal groups, she says Emanuel should be fired.

Then her buddy Rush Limbaugh comes out and says, "Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult's taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards."

Chris Wallace asked her about that Sunday, and Palin practically wrestled herself to the ground so she didn't make Limbaugh - who seems to take her seriously - mad at her. What Palin tried looked trickier than some yoga positions.

Palin: "Rush Limbaugh was using satire."

No, he wasn't. If Palin believes that, she really is more limited, and bubble-headed, than Paris Hilton. If not, she is simply a transparent phony.

In so many ways, Palin has become the great old line from the movie "All About Eve," the one about the piano thinking it wrote the concerto.

"How's that hope-y, change-y thing workin' out for ya," she said in this lame, singsong way in Nashville, thinking she was being funny. No. Tina Fey - playing Palin on "Saturday Night Live" - was funny. No matter how hard she tries to be taken seriously, Palin is a joke.