The croupier dealt the cards out on the table.  The players all see the hands.  And now the  participants can continue the game, fold, call it quits, or move to another table.

After long thought, I now think FBI director James Comey did his best: he crucified Hillary on a cross of lies, mishandling, deceitfulness, recklessness, and self-aggrandizing supposed inviolability.  In so doing, without the coup de grâce of a proper formal indictment, Comey stopped short of indicting Hillary Rodham and did not then cause a huge tumult in the already turbulent  electoral process by vitiating the ongoing campaign.  He did not deprive the left team of their star pitcher, HRC.  He did not leave the campaign without a viable candidate, to be filled in by who-knows-what replacement pitcher.

Unappetizing as it seems to many, Comey can live to investigate another day, and Hillary has been found untrustworthy in damning testimony widely disseminated.  Once and endlessly on YouTube and forever on the dinosaur media.

To be sure, the GOP will make hay with this fodder for the remaining months of the presidential circus of a campaign.  Many Democrats, too, are disgusted, whether she was formally indicted or not.  Independents did not love the decision, either, but took it into their considerations of whom they might vote for in the November sweeps.

The FBI proceedings over two long years wounded this afflictional candidate with a series of mortal blows.

Everything she now says in public, in commercials and that her assigns say on her behalf, will be viewed with ironic scare quotes and incipient hoots of disbelief – what she says about Donald Trump is not a patch on what has now been declared and bruited widely as her personal Waterloo of disingenuous guilt in all the issues those on the right have long been trumpeting.

Remember: The Clinton Foundation, source of major regulatory no-nos and more than questionable practices since its inception in 1997, remains still to be publicized and brought into the court of public opinion and "transparency."  Both Bill Clinton, president from 1993 to 2001, and his daughter Chelsea are dangling from the meshes of the foundation net.

There is serious and not unreasonable talk of removing Hillary Rodham's security clearance, which would be a remarkable development in the career of a woman seeking the highest office in the land.

Wherever you stand on Hillary Rodham, FBI director Comey negotiated carefully through the Scylla and Charybdis of the law and allocation of "justice" but lives to indict and expose another day.