Bush defended waterboarding in his interview with Matt Lauer, while retaining his horror at Abu Ghraib. Adam Serwer notes the incoherence:
...why was torturing detainees at Gitmo an act of heroism, while torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib an act of moral depravity, a disgrace to America's good name?
The answer seems obvious -- in the case of Abu Ghraib, Americans, faced with visual evidence of torture, recoiled. Fortunately for Bush, the CIA destroyed the visual documentation of their torturous interrogations, and those responsible will never be held to account. But there's no genuine moral distinction here between what happened at Abu Ghraib and what happened at the black sites, or at Gitmo, that would justify being horrified by one and not the others. The lesson that was learned, by that administration and this one, is that the crime is worse than the cover-up. So cover it up.
What has struck me about the book so far - only from its reviews, some excerpts and the TV interview - is how utterly unchanged Bush is, how unreflective, defensive, and shut down he is to the core challenges of his presidency. How do you launch a war on false grounds that leads to the deaths of 150,000 civilians, destroys America's moral standing, and empowers America's enemy, Iran, and say you'd do it all again? How do you find Kanye West more disgusting than Abu Ghraib?
How do you become a human being so isolated from your own reality?