Q:

What is the prototype of “Place blame where it is deserved / Blame where it’s due / Blame only where blame is due”?

New Yorker (June 13) carries an article written by John Cassidy under the title, “The Iraq mess: Place blame where it is deserved.”
I thought the phrase, “Place blame where it is deserved” is a popular, fixed saying, and checked it on Google. I wasn’t able to find this phrase in the headings. Instead, I found the headline, “Teachers: Blame only where blame is due” in the article dealing with teachers’ responsibility for students’ performance in Washington Post’s archive (April 19, 2011), and “Blame its due” dealing with the growing problems of colony collapse of bees in MYRMECOS (May 1, 2014).
Obviously all headlines are saying the same thing with slightly different wordings. Are they simple variations of a popular idiom or cliché? If so, what is the "prototype" or standard phrasing of “Place blame where it is deserved / Blame where it’s due / Blame only where blame is due”?

A:

There is a popular idiom to:  "Give credit where credit is due".  It would seem that some of those instances you quoted are derived directly from that phrase, substituting 'blame' instead of 'credit'.  "Place blame where it is deserved", on the other hand, sounds like a more literal application than a variant on the idiom.

