Virtually everyone else hip to mathematics has been proceeding for some time now on the crushing assumption that Barack Obama is, has been, and shall remain the chosen one, since he has, has had, and shall retain the lead in every conceivable metric of victory but chutzpah.

He's been shadow boxing not so much an opposing campaign as a swaggering hope, and a ghostly — as well as increasingly ghastly — one at that.

Had it not been for the media egging this thing on from their ringside seats, it would have been unambiguously over long ago. For every minute of on-air reality and every line of in-print concession that, yes, the delegate count is what matters and boy it sure is hard to see a way around Obama's decisive lead there, we've been treated to hours and reams of extravagant media speculations on the slimmest alternatives.

Here's what now seems obvious: African-American voters killed the Clinton candidacy. It is a fitting end to the Clintons' campaign and an almost Shakespearean coda to their career. The Clintons were exposed in their long-running exploitation and reliance on minority votes. No group was more loyal to them than African-Americans; and in the end, like everyone else, African-Americans realized that the Clintons are frauds, disloyal to the core, cynical to their finger-tips, and finally, finally, returned the favor.

This will be history's verdict: in the end, the Clintons were defeated not by Republicans, but by African-American Democrats. How wonderful. How poignant. In the end, the karma gets you. Maybe it had to be this way. But this final coup de grace against these awful, hollow, cynical people is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

For weeks Sen. Clinton and her supporters taunted the Obama campaign with the question, "Why can't he close the deal?" Fair enough. If Obama is going to be the nominee, they argued, why can't he deliver some more decisive wins?

After tonight's results the question has to be reversed: Why couldn't she close the deal? Sen. Clinton needed a forceful victory to deliver the message that she, not Sen. Obama, has momentum and vote-getting ability. Yet she lost resoundingly in North Carolina, and as of this writing Indiana hangs in the balance. I'm not prepared to write the Clinton campaign's obit yet - that's been done one too many times already. They may continue to fight for a while, but the outcome is now inevitable.

Clinton has stood by her implicitly genocidal threat against the 70 million innocent Iranians, who have no effective control over their government’s policy, a threat made in response to a question raised in the heat of primary day in Pennsylvania. She later extended the threat to include retaliation on behalf of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab countries if they were attacked by Iran.

Her statement extending the US “nuclear umbrella” far beyond the threat to retaliate against a Soviet nuclear attack during the Cold War was greeted with a yawn by the media, which interpreted it as an election-day ploy to appear tough and pro-Israel. The Washington Post referred to “Clinton’s apparent effort to distinguish herself from her rival for the Democratic nomination … by offering a more hawkish approach to world affairs.” That rival, Barack Obama, has called for negotiations with Iran’s leaders and condemned Clinton’s proposal as saber rattling.

Hillary Clinton = George Bush