Derb – The modern faith in the power of words on paper knows no bounds. Forget the Kellogg-Briand Pact. My favorite example was from NY Governor George Pataki. “It is conceivable,” he said upon signing a hate-crimes bill a few years ago “that if this law had been in effect one hundred years ago, the greatest hate crime of all, the Holocaust, could have been avoided.”
Ah, that’s what would have stopped Hitler — a law saying it was illegal to exterminate millions!