Several months ago, I read a letter from a reader in Playboy that got me so upset that I had to respond in kind with a letter of my own. Hef's minions, however, chose not to print said letter, obviously blind to its depths of insight and literary excellence. That will not, though, keep me from sharing my opinions with the world, thus I present for you the full text of the aforementioned epistle:
I'm writing in response to the letter from Benjamin Chan printed in the September issue of Playboy in which Mr. Chan accuses the magazine of "liberal bias" and "trying to rewrite history" because of a joke whose punchine stated that Bill Clinton "almost got impeached." I will not deny that Playboy has a liberal bias. That (plus the pictorials, of course) are why I read it. However, using this joke in an attempt to show said bias is itself a joke.
It is far more likely that, rather than an attempt at revisionist history, the reference to Bill Clinton's "almost" impreachment stems from a very common misunderstanding of what it actually means to impeach a president or other government official. My Webster's dictionary defines "impeach" as "...to charge (a public official) before a competent tribunal with misconduct in office," which is exactly what happened to President Clinton. However, there is a general misconception that to impeach means to remove from office. By being impeached, Mr. Clinton was, in fact, "almost" removed from office.
It is clear from his letter that Mr. Chan understands the true meaning of impeach. It is also clear that he was so blinded by his own conservative politics and hatred of liberals that he read a sinister political agenda into what was quite obviously an innocent vocabulary error.
