There wasn’t any, but don’t tell Ed Henry.

But on other hand, I think Peter King raises a fair point about the fact that in a crisis, and here we had a situation where over 200 people could have been and came close to being killed on Christmas Day, that is normally something where you expect the president of the United States to step forward and reassure the public.

I know from covering George W. Bush, he certainly would have been out there. This White House pushes back on that pretty hard, saying, they have a much different style from the past administration. That was certainly fought out in the campaign. It is a different approach.

Via the hard work and googling of jethropalerobber and other DKos netizens, we find the first and looks like only reference by GWB on Reid.-

Bush did in fact reference the shoe bomber incident during the course of a press Q&A outside a diner in Crawford on December 31. Famed soft profiler Elisabeth Bumiller records Bush’s comment in paragraph 7 of this piece:

Mr. Bush, in his last question-and-answer session with reporters in 2001, also said that the main task of the F.B.I. was now to protect Americans from further attacks.

”The whole culture of the F.B.I. has changed for the better,” Mr. Bush said. He added that the country as a whole was ”on alert” and praised the flight attendant on an American Airlines flight on Dec. 22 who noticed the man whom Mr. Bush called ”the shoe bomber,” Richard C. Reid, trying to light a fuse in his sneaker.

NYT 01/01/2002

There’s a couple phrases that come to mind- willful ignorance and double standard.