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I caught Frank Rich's column, too and was glad to see him making the same point (and for presumably a larger audience!).
Similar thoughts from Frank Rich, in his March 27 column, "The God Racket, from DeMille To DeLay":
"The same Mr. Bush who couldn’t be bothered to interrupt his vacation during the darkening summer of 2001, not even when he received a briefing titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,' flew from his Crawford ranch to Washington to sign Congress’s Schiavo bill into law. The bill could have been flown to him in Texas, but his ceremonial arrival and departure by helicopter on the White House lawn allowed him to showboat as if he had just landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Within hours he turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a Social Security rally. 'It is wise to always err on the side of life,' he said, wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when he mocked the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again Texas death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker Carlson."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/arts/27Rich.html?8hpib