O'Reilly's first move in the discussion is to put words in Dr. Rosenbaum's mouth. Presumably, they have been talking prior to going on the air. But we can only presume that, and we can only presume that the doctor actually said something that might be paraphrased in this way.

More importantly, though, the opening move is an attempt to force the doctor to discuss the issue on O'Reilly's morally simplistic level. "Come on, Doc, were they right or wrong?"

Rosenbaum refuses to be pushed off message by O'Reilly's invitation. She does not accept the question of "right or wrong" yet, because without the discussion that is about to occur, the judgmental terms amount to nothing but a vote for or against some absolutist legalism.

Again, a standard move, a more aggressive attempt to put words in her mouth than the opening statement. Instead of responding to the doctor's point (or letting her finish), O'Reilly "paraphrases" her perfectly clear comment, restructuring it not as "what she is saying" but as what he wants her to say so he can attack it.

What she is saying seems pretty clear. If you know your kids are going to drink, which is better: letting them drink at home or letting them out on the streets in cars? If telling them not to drink isn't going to stop them, then what? O'Reilly has his macho-man answer to that one, by the way. Read on.

O'Reilly interrupts her to knock her off balance and then questions her again in the same tone when she is done. The staccato "What is it?" manages to suggest impatience and disgust. And notice that she is talking about parents trying to have contingency plans to keep their children safe, and he turns that into a plan. With classic categorical thinking (which Rosenbaum encourages with her own pronoun shift), Rosenbaum is maneuvered into seeming to propose the solution to teen drinking, rather than a strategy for dealing with it.

In this sputter of righteousness we get a concession ("Nobody opposes that") which as it turns out is just window dressing. In fact, of course "someone" opposes it, or programs like it would not have to fight for funding. I'm sure the doctor could tell war stories about the oppostion to such programs. Even O'Reilly opposes it, though he isn't going to say that here. He isn't going to drive them home; see below.

And then we segue immediately into soapbox generalization. This isn't about the dentist and his wife, you see, it's about what "happens all over the country!" But what exactly is it that is happening all over the country? O'Reilly isn't specific. Is it people arranging for their underage kids to have booze parties in the basement? None in my neighborhood. Is it underage drinking (as the doctor takes it to mean in her unfortunate response to the tirade, below)? Well, Ok, that certainly is "happening all over the country," but that, of course, is exactly what the doctor is saying and what the criminal parents were attempting to deal with.

In a word, O'Reilly's "outrage" exists entirely for its own sake. What is he outraged about? That some adults let some kids got drunk in their basement? Maybe he should focus his outrage on problems more immediately victimizing, like parents who drive drunk.

The doctor's been doing a pretty good job so far, but here she slips. "It does"? What does? Under the same circumstances, most of us would have trouble holding our own, and Rosenbaum manages to stay on message and resist O'Reilly's bullying. But here she lets him slip a loose pronoun past her, and she's going to pay for it.

Rosenbaum is being suckered by her own values. She is as troubled by underage drinking as O'Reilly is. (His concern is sincere, however repulsive his rhetoric and simpleminded his solutions; a glance at his book of advice to kids confirms this.) So she lets him have his head here, and even cheers him on ("And cell phones"?). This is classic progressive failure in debate; assuming that the neocon message has room for accommodation and modification, that, in a word, they actually want to discuss an issue rather than legislate. O'Reilly doesn't care if she agrees with him "some"; he's going to attack her differences, not respect them, and he'll use their agreements against her.

Her last comment suggests that she truly doesn't get it. She thinks that they are converging, reaching an understanding, that O'Reilly is acknowledging some merit on the parents' side of the issue. Fat chance.

Apparently taking the car keys away is not crucial. What is "crucial" is stating a moral judgement that O'Reilly has already made, is unwilling to modulate, and demands that the doctor take a categorical position on. Unlike the doctor, O'Reilly knows what the real issues are. She is not merely disagreeing with him, she is wrong.

Notice the reductiveness of "Ok." What utter foolishness it would be to answer with either a yes or no. Of course it's not "Ok"! But if you say so, then the full weight of O'Reilly's rhetoric collapses on you like a fat wrestler on a downed opponent, because you have agreed with him, after all your liberal hemming and hawing.

And if in exasperation you say it is Ok, then God help you. Game over.

She slips out from under that body slam.

O'Reilly's "Yes" is another setup for a sucker punch, of course. Once again, the doctor is treated as someone who is not merely disagreeing but stupid.

O'Reilly's orchestrating things nicely here. His "Yes/No!" makes the doctor sound like an idiot. How shocked he is, that she could use a phrase like "calculated decision" to describe something so wrong-headed. She doesn't need to be rebuted, she needs to be corrected.

As with "crucial," O'Reilly refuses to allow the doctor–or the parents–any moral room. They didn't do what he would have done, so they done wrong.

O'Reilly's righteous rhetoric leaves no room for negotiation, no room for circumstances, no room for alternative values. Rosenbaum doesn't know what is "crucial"; he does. O'Reilly knows what the parents were really deciding under cover of the doctor's lame apologetics and explanations. They weren't really concerned about the kids, or they would have done the only thing one could do under the circumstances, what O'Reilly would have done (which, by the way, is to offer them a choice between American Bandstand and banishment. Read on, and imagine your kid making that choice.)

This sort of literary omniscience is not peculiar to neocons, but it is characteristic of their style. It is not enough to judge people's actions; one has the moral authority to identify and judge their motives as well, even if the motives are hidden to all but the righteous. So holding a view that neocons disagree with is not merely wrong, it is lying, it is treason, it is hypocrisy.

Ironically, I happen to agree with O'Reilly, not the doctor, that the couple should have been charged. They took a calculated risk, and got caught. If a man steals to feed his children, he's still a thief. However, the function of the court is to consider motives and circumstances and offer justice to people. They should be charged, but the circumstances should mitigate their punishment.

Rosenbaum's willingness to let them off the hook is a bit too glib for my taste, even though I agree with her that they did the right thing, given the situation.

Instead of wondering what planet O'Reilly lives on, where Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve is even more interesting to the average teen than, say, Lawrence Welk, let's notice that he is pushing a button here. This "underage daughter" is eighteen, not thirteen. Mary Shelley and Jane Austen were drafting their first books when they were eighteen. Britney Spears and the Olsen girls were millionaires. Any number of American girls are married, pregnant, and working by then.

By O'Reilly's own evidence, above, the dentist's daughter is "underage" because New York raised the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one. (Which reminds me of what we used to say when I was in college about being too young to drink, vote, or get married but old enough to die in Vietnam.) So yes, technically, she is "underage."

The deception here might seem incidental if it were not such a pervasive scam in neocon rhetoric. For example, I was engaged in an ugly argument with a group of neocons who were denigrating Bush critic Scott Ritter as a "pedophile." It turns out that the accusation of pedophilia resulted from him meeting with an undercover FBI informant pretending to be a sixteen-year-old girl. In a McDonald's, not a motel.

Never mind that the charges were thrown out by the courts and the FBI chided for entrapment of a conservative Marine hero inconvenient to the current Bush Iraq agenda. What I ask you to consider is the difference between the notion of adults preying on "children" and the sexual sophistication of the average sixteen-year-old American girl. To my hopelessly non-literal mind, pedophilia doesn't apply to teenagers. Adult men who seek sexual favors from teens are not my idea of pillars of society, but the gap between them and the fellow arrested yesterday as a serial rapist, whose youngest victim was a six-year-old boy, is considerable.

But "pedophile" stings, and "underage" summons images of hairless pre-adolescents. Just how "underage" were the fifty kids in that basement? If the hostess was eighteen, how many kids more than two years younger than her are likely to be part of her circle? How many of the "underage" drinkers were nineteen or twenty, more than old enough to get plastered in Colorado?

Here we go on another round of righteous indignation. O'Reilly has suggested that you woo your eighteen-year-old into staying home with promises of Dick Clark and fun, and Rosenbaum, perhaps a bit more in touch with reality, slips into patronizing politeness. "That's nice." Big mistake for the elitist intellectual.

Rosenbaum seems a bit at a loss here, perhaps because O'Reilly's vision of Ozzie and Harriet bliss catches her off-guard, perhaps because "what he would do" is a bit of a non sequitur. He would...?

O'Reilly moves his own position forward in a way that Rosenbaum is too polite to attack. It's pretty clear from what's gone on so far that O'Reilly doesn't have kids, so this bit of patriarchal bluster is macho fantasy.

More important, though, note that he has changed the sex of the drinking teen to male. Why? Because in the world of his listeners, disowning a son is more acceptable than disowning a daughter. Think of the mournful ballads about daughters freezing on Daddy's doorstep because he won't let them in. Can you think of one in which the freezing miscreant is a son?

The doctor lets him off easy here, perhaps growing weary of the argument.

As I said, I tend to agree that the parents broke the law, and that the law they broke is a good law. Where I find myself siding with the doctor is in her view that the parents chose the lesser of two evils.

The interview concludes with a clear expression of the fundamental difference between the doctor's situational ethics, trying to find the lesser evil, and O'Reilly's simplistic reduction to black and white, categorical and totally divorced from the real world.

So much for giving her the last word.

That last word is a key to neocon manipulation. O'Reilly uses his to reinforce the notion that we can solve teenage drinking by enforcing obedience with radical punishment. When the cheering dies down after O'Reilly announces that his [hypothetical] drinking kid will be banished, let's try to picture the scene a bit more particularly.

The dentist's eighteen-year-old daughter (not O'Reilly's hypothetical son) goes out against her parents wishes and comes home smelling of MaiTai. Dad the Father won't let her inside the house. "Out!" If her ride has left, she is standing, indefinitely drunk, on the street on a January night in New York, prey to muggers, cold, and whatever else culls the unworthy in New York. If her ride is still sitting at the curb, she has the option of climbing back into the car with her hypothetically drunk friends.

I suppose there are American parents to whom one has to articulate how real parents who love their children would handle this situation, and how ugly the father's righteousness is. I'll bet O'Reilly isn't one of the them.