She wasn’t gone. Only resting.

Sarah Palin’s big message for Obama: “Step away from the teleprompter and do your job.” This from the woman best known for stepping away from her job to do the teleprompter.

Palin, you’ll recall, bailed halfway through her governor gig so she could spend more time on TV. For awhile it seemed like a good move; it was easier than governing and paid better. She had her own reality show and was a regular on Fox News. Then the show got canceled and the people at Fox decided they needed somebody more capable of extemporaneous thought. For the past year she’s been kind of quiet, her fling with A-list fame apparently over. I almost felt sorry for her, in the way I almost felt sorry for Dennis Rodman when he was kissing the ass of a much shorter man in Pyongyang.

Let’s just say the pangs of pity were premature. Palin’s back, bigtime. There she was at CPAC, mugging with a Big Gulp, branding Obama a liar, ridiculing gun background checks. She tossed off a redneck jest about Todd’s rifle and her rack. If the woman has learned anything of her own limitations, she’s hiding it well.

Maybe her most jarring line of the night was this: “We don’t have leadership coming out of Washington. We have reality television. Except it’s really bad TV, and America tuned out a long time ago.”

Hmmm. Kind of like the actual reality show for which Sarah Palin traded her governorship. “Really bad,” check. “America tuned out,” check. Nevertheless, the crowd went wild.

They do sarcasm at CPAC, but they don’t do irony.