Daily Inspiration Quote by Howard Fineman

Fineman turns a procedural dodge into a moral indictment by writing the exchange the way you’d recount an evasive witness on a stand: “acted as though the question was an odd one.” That phrasing does two jobs at once. It’s reportage, but it’s also character sketching. Rice isn’t merely declining responsibility; she’s signaling that the very premise of oversight is abnormal. The subtext is bureaucratic self-protection: if the question feels “odd,” then accountability itself can be framed as unfair or amateurish.

The hinge is the blunt pivot: “it wasn’t her job. Well, in retrospect, it was and now certainly is.” Fineman weaponizes hindsight, not as cheap gotcha, but as a forced recalibration of what “the job” actually means after catastrophe. The sentence compresses a whole post-9/11 cultural shift: the National Security Advisor as coordinator, yes, but also as the person who must insist on connecting dots across agencies that are structurally incentivized not to share them. “Pressed the FBI more closely” is doing heavy lifting; it implies the problem wasn’t ignorance alone, but a failure of friction - not applying enough pressure where institutional inertia lives.

Context matters: hearings are theater, but they’re also the place where job descriptions get rewritten in public. Fineman’s intent is to deny the refuge of narrow role definitions. If domestic terror fell between jurisdictions, he argues, that gap wasn’t an accident - it was the unclaimed space where leadership was supposed to stand.