I'm just guessing, but I think her memoir of the woman in the wheelchair being helped down stairs during an evacuation when it was palpably dangerous to stay, may have been a trigger moment for something Catholics in particular seem to be vulnerable to, viz., a "sudden conversion" moment.
In this case, the contrast would have been between the healthy Republicans hauling ass off the grounds, and the low-paid security workers patiently helping the wheelchair-bound woman down the stairs. Instant "moral inequation" slams her in the forehead:
I.e., the putative Democrats behaved more nobly than the putative Republican conservatives.
I would emphasize further that this is how she likely experienced the thought, but that it got past her higher thought and arrived instead as a plain, simple impulsive thought that was driven home by adrenalin, and the suspension of rational thought under stress.
It's simplistic "sidewalk psychology" and begs better comment by trained professionals, but under stress, I think Catholics and other morally-tweaked-and-trained people are vulnerable to that kind of conversion, which please note, is largely immune to rational interrogation or recension. It's psychological, not logical or rational.
Another ex-Catholic who experienced this "conversion syndrome" was the late Philip Agee, who left the CIA and collaborated with the KGB and Cuban DGI in writing "expose's" of the CIA, like Inside the Company. That his moral unhappiness with the messy work of antiterrorism (he was tasked against the violent Tupamaro urban guerrillas of Uruguay) might have led him to leave the profession is one thing, but the completeness of his unhinging, and his moral change of allegiance over to the Tupamaros is evidenced by his lack of trepidation at crawling into bed with the most bestial and blood-soaked secret-police organization in history, the KGB.
I can't think of any religion which emphasizes reason and logic more than Catholicism. Unfortunately, the American Church has been remiss in teaching it.