The movie A Few Good Men comes to a climax when Tom Cruise elicits an admission from Jack Nicholson that he did, in fact, instruct his subordinates to commit a certain illegal act (the unofficial disciplinary sanction of "a Code Red") that violated the law, for the greater good of protecting the unit. Bush has just about reached that point himself, now -- where he's so frustrated at his questioners, and so sure of the rightness of his cause, that he admits he did what they're asking about, because he knows he's right.
If you read the torture memo (available here), you can see how Bush and his administration understood the torture to be surprisingly legal (with a perspective that, to paraphrase Ving Rhames and Karen Hughes, is "pretty fuckin' far from normal."). And if you read Bush's comments at the G-8 summit ("What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law," "The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law.") you can see him arguing, essentially, that the law is what his lawyers said it was, and that everything they said was legal, was fair game, and he condoned, if not ordered, everything necessary within that interpretation of the law.
What's wrong with this? Bush's lawyers are badly wrong, and Bush himself is so smug and intellectually incurious that nobody had a second thought about such a morally dubious stretch. If the Bush Administration had a reasonable understanding of what constituted torture, and what circumstances, if any, justified it, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. But Bush's lawyers stretched the definition of torture beyond what most people and courts would accept, and neither the Bush Administration's lawyers nor Bush himself saw much wrong with this, and he has no idea why this is such a big deal. That's what's really scary.