I swoon for Amanda Terkel

I swoon for Amanda Terkel.

Yes, I said "swoon".

Am I allowed to swoon?

I ask that question not because I'm married ( I think married people can swoon, as long as the swooning is innocent. ), but because I'm a guy. Can guys swoon?

When we think of swooning, we generally think of girls swooning - usually young girls. Young girls swoon over their favorite singers or movie stars. Can a 39 year-old guy swoon? Does that even make sense? Well, I don't know and I don't care. All I know is that I am swooning for the woman below.


Who is Amanda Terkel and why do I swoon so?

Well, Amanda is definitely one of those "Smart Girls with Glasses" that I wrote about in my last blog post. She's a liberal blogger who writes for the blog Think Progress ( There is a link to the Think Progress blog on the right side of my blog page. If you want to go straight to Amanda's blog entries, you can click this link. ).

Of course, as smart and swoon-eriffic as Ms.Terkel might be, I wouldn't have had any idea who she was it wasn't for conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly. I can't stand Bill O'Reilly, but I guess I have to thank him giving Amanda her 15 minutes of fame.

O'Reilly was scheduled to speak at a fundraiser for the Alexa Foundation, a group committed to supporting rape survivors. This wouldn't be a bad thing if O'Reilly was the kind of person who actually supported rape victims, but O'Reilly's is the type of person who often blames the rape victim.

Check out O'Reilly's comments about Jennifer Moore, an 18-year old who was raped and murdered:

"So anyway, these two girls come in from the suburbs and they get bombed, and their car is towed because they're moronic girls and, you know, they don't have a car. So they're standing there in the middle of the night with no car. And then they separate because they're drunk. They separate, which you never do. All right.

Now Moore, Jennifer Moore, 18, on her way to college. She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again, there you go. So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in the morning. She's walking by herself on the West Side Highway, and she gets picked up by a thug. All right. Now she's out of her mind, drunk."

So, O'Reilly is clearly a world-class hypocrite. Ms. Terkel called out O'Reilly on this in a March 1st blog post.

O'Reilly responded in a sickeningly ironic way. He sent out two of his henchmen to stalk Terkel while she was on vacation, so they could conduct an ambush interview. You can see the ambush interview in the YouTube clip below.

I think Amanda handled herself rather well considering the circumstances. O'Reilly and his henchmen came out looking like total dicks, and the world was introduced to the oh-so-swoony Amanda Terkel.

So, after I watched a segment on the O'Reilly/Terkel feud on Olbermann's show, I found myself swooning for Ms. Terkel.

Amanda Terkel's smart, liberal, pretty, and has some pretty cool glasses - and that my friends is HOT.

Hey, if young teeny-bopper girls can swoon for their pretty-boy singers, I'm allowed to do some swooning too.

I'll leave you all with one more swoon-worthy image of Ms. Terkel: