Maybe Cain should have tried ham salad instead....

THE REPUBLICAN efforts at Scrabble to make a word out of "winner" continue with one big difference: They can't turn in all of their candidates and draw a complete set of new ones.

On Saturday, the field shrank by one. Declaring that "politics is a dirty business,"(Oh?)

Herman Cain, the pizza guy, gave up his hopeless bid for the Oval Office. Cain's reason was not unusual in politics today: something about a female relationship (s). Think, Dem John Edwards. And GOP starlets Mark Sanford and John Ensign.

I, for one, will miss the Hermanator. He had a way with logic. "Listen," he once demanded. "You might just learn something." On another occasion, he soberly declared: "You need chicken to make chicken salad."

And that may explain why Candidate Cain laid an egg.