Shouldn't Hillary be at least partly culpable since she offered such an inviting target?  Shouldn't John Podesta be blamed for using "password" as his secure password and clicking on a "larger penis" ad?

In the City of St. Louis, there is a law saying you cannot warm your car up on winter days and not be in attendance.  Why?  They put that law in effect because people were starting their cars and leaving them unattended while they warmed, and ne'er-do-wells were stealing them.  You can say it's blaming the victim, and it is, but the logic cannot be argued, which is that crimes of opportunity are being committed.  You have a duty to minimize such opportunities.

There used to be a slogan years ago, "don't help a good boy go bad," which was dutifully promoted by liberals.  The notion was that offering temptation through opportunities to commit crimes was a form of complicity with the crime.  (I don't agree; crime is ultimately bad morality.)  Hillary clearly did not practice this.

Or how about "loose lips sink ships"?  Hill's lips were apt to sink the Titanic.

In point of fact, the left has always excused criminality in an effort to promote their sense of social justice (just look at the hoops they have jumped through to ignore Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown or the gang who tortured the mentally disabled kid in Chicago), and yet now they declare Russia guilty, guilty, guilty! because their ox has been gored.  Well, Russia can be viewed as underprivileged if you use their standards, so why are they so uptight?

Backed by sociological studies like the 1970s "Crime as Opportunity" or the 1998 "Opportunity Makes the Thief" papers, the left has systematically put the burden of crime prevention on the victim and not the criminal who is often seen as a victim of society.

It is the entirety of the gun control argument.  The sociologist Ronald V. Clarke, one of the authors of these studies, argue:

Third, in the same publication we sought to explain why rates of homicide were eight times greater in the United States than in England and Wales during the mid-1980s, when rates for most other crimes differed little between the two countries. This difference was the result of a much higher rate of gun homicides in the United States, particularly handgun homicides, which in turn was due to much higher levels of gun ownership -- a situational variable -- in that country than in England and Wales.

So if guns and not people kill people, and we must restrict gun ownership, why isn't Hillary blamed for leaving an unlocked firearm lying around in cyberspace?

Remember how the media excused the rioting in Ferguson?  Well, the opportunity was there, so who can blame them?  That was largely the case made by the defenders of the rioters, and yet now we are not supposed to think that way.  Rioting is understandable; hacking somehow is not, even when you leave a "rob me" sign on your digital doorstep.

In the end, hers was criminal carelessness.  If you hit a pedestrian because you are texting, you will be charged with a crime.  Hillary plowed over the American voters with her Scooby Van while politically texting.  Shouldn't there be some sort of culpability for that?

Hey, the Russians just took advantage of a golden opportunity, if indeed it even was the Russians.

Tim blogs at The Aviary. www.tbirdnow.mee.nu