First, a confession. I was an avid supporter of President Clinton. Voted for him twice and remember well the day he was first elected. I happened to be living in Seattle at the time and was downtown when the news came over the wire. Clinton is our new President. On a lovely fall day, with Elliot Bay growing dark at dusk, I looked out over the water from Pike Place Market and thought, oh wow. Joy of joys. At long last we’ve elected someone from our own generation.

All right, so the I didn’t inhale thing never sat all that well with me. Seemed pretty lame at the time, as did the Bill and Hillary holding hands for us in front of the national cameras thing that same year, playing the dutiful couple and trying oh so hard to diffuse the Jennifer Flowers affair. Hell, even their choice of campaign theme song turned my stomach a bit. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow. That was the Sixties for lightweights, for people who really weren’t there.

But at least we hadn’t elected one more old geezer. After twelve years of Reagan and Bush the Elder, frankly Nixon was beginning to look attractive to me.

Who knew the aforementioned shenanigans were only a whiff of the dissembling to come? Filegate. Travelgate. Whitewater. Selling the Lincoln bedroom, Paula Jones, the list went on and on. And I’m talking here as a guy who subscribed to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Backed Bill right up to the end, even as the stench from the Monica Lewinsky affair began to pile up and the wasted opportunities multiplied. Bill, having lost all political leverage, had to let things like the CAFE standards, the environment and global warming be thrown under his careening bus.

Bill, I once heard, rued his misfortune of being a President without a great moment in history to stand astride. If only he had been afforded a great war, like FDR, or Lincoln. Yet in fact he had something quite momentous in his lap, a chance to steer the world away from fossil fuels, only the fool was too consumed with triangulation and saving his own ass to do the matter justice.

Well, after standing by you and all your subterfuge for eight years, Bill and Hillary, don’t be surprised to find me so thoroughly offended. Seeing you employ the same right-wing tactics we decried on your behalf, to say I’m insulted simply doesn’t do the matter justice. Your behavior has gone far beyond reprehensible. Simply put, you’ve acted just like the Republicans who so mercilessly attacked you for all those years.

I keep thinking you’ll go home one night, look in the mirror and feel some measure of remorse or shame, but apparently it’s not in you. Like Machiavelli, you believe any tactic is permissible in the acquisition of power. Fair enough, but to turn an old phrase, the end will never be different from the means. If anyone wonders what a Hillary presidency would look like, just watch her campaign. As the old saying goes, if it starts out badly, it never gets any better.

Honestly, distracted by my work and a thousand other things over the past few weeks, and tired down to my soul of this whole, sad spectacle, I’ve been inclined to just crawl in a hole, politically speaking, but found I could no longer sit on my hands. In the face of the Clinton’s nefarious activities, I was compelled to start a serial blog in their honor.

Knowing, sadly, that Bill and Hillary would never fail to provide me with fresh ammunition, I was no less surprised to awakening yesterday morning and read the news.

Rocky?!?

The woman’s living in a fantasy world, I thought. She’s gone completely mad.

Then, in latching onto the Rocky legend, I realized Hillary had made an unwitting choice. Never mind that Rocky was a grade B movie, made by a mediocre actor, about a Neanderthal palooka, who, in all honesty, would have gotten his ass kicked in the real world. Hillary needed a Hollywood ending to her political drama and Rocky seemed to be the perfect fit.

Rocky and I have a lot in common, she says. I never quit. I never give up.

Well maybe, as with that little Bosnia fib you made of late, you’re fudging the truth a bit and ignoring a rather thorny fact. There were all those third rate sequels, and that's what your increasingly pathetic campaign has become. As time goes by, your ratings will continue to plummet. People will only squirm more and more uncomfortably in their seats. Hillary, you’re in a chess game you simply can’t win. You’re only hope is to upset the entire chess board.

There was a time when you could have bowed out gracefully, with the Democratic Party and the country’s best interests in mind, and maybe that opportunity still exists, but as you drag this out to its bitter end, don’t blame us, Hillary, for making the inevitable comparison. You were always going to be Apollo Creed. Remember? The candidacy that was all but inevitable?

You can go ahead and switch roles now, if you like, but again, don't blame us for seeing through the lies. This is Rocky III or Rocky IV, at best. And I, for one, sit here hoping to be spared a remake of Rocky V.