Or maybe 

"One unfortunate consequence" of the new Pelagian heresy, according to Posner, can be that "the people who get blamed for an undesired outcome are the people who were doing their best -- and the best may have been very good -- to prevent it from happening."

...a preemptive defense.

So unless we are determined heretics, we should show a little more humility and remember that it is not always possible to predict and prevent all misfortune s . Posner says: "Some injuries occur without culpability, simply because the costs of preventing the injury would have exceeded the expected benefits."

Sounds like the the way Hastert looked at Foley for the last couple of years.

The Bush administration can be faulted for its preparation for, and response to, Hurricane Katrina, but not for failing to prevent the hurricane itself. There will never be 100 percent security.

Huh? Who ever blamed Bush for the hurricane?

Not every misfortune can be prevented
By H.D.S. Greenway  |  October 10, 2006

AMID ALL the agonizing and political post-9/11 posturing over whether we are safer than we were five years ago I found myself thinking of the fifth-century monk, Pelagius, and the heresy that bears his name. Pelagius got into trouble with Rome because he denied the existence of original sin and believed that men and women could, by their own choice, live a life of moral goodness deserving of salvation without God's grace.

The church was horrified at the suggestion that any salvation could occur without God's grace and, by extension, its own, and no less a figure than St. Augustine was brought in on the case. Pelagius was excommunicated and banished from Rome.

It took Richard Posner, the prolific judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, to introduce me to a modern version of Pelagius's heresy. In his book, "Preventing Surprise Attacks," a treatise on the 9/11 Commission and the re organization of government to combat terrorism, Posner posits that Americans have a "cultural peculiarity" that holds that "human will can conquer all adversities." Thus "every non success is deemed a culpable failure."

There are in life "acts of God" in which bad things happen but for which no one is to blame. The modern Pelagian heresy, however, holds that there are no acts of God, that for every misfortune in life somebody is at fault. This leads to the proclivity of Americans to sue each other for ridiculous happenings for which no one is to blame, except maybe the person who is doing the suing. The famous case of the woman who spilled coffee on her lap and sued the coffee brewer for making the coffee too hot comes to mind.

According to Posner, the payment of enormous sums of money to the families of the victims of 9/11 attacks as if they were victims of wrongful conduct, "rather than casualties of war," is an example. "Yet how callous it would sound to say to the families of the victims, it was just one of those things," he writes.