it's four a.m. do you know where your presidential candidate is?

So it’s 3:30 am here. Which is 8:30 pm Eastern Time. And, although I’m rather tired from a long day of learning the how the הפעיל verb binyan (class) conjugates in the past tense, and how there is this thing called compensatory lengthening whereby the ultra-short vowel שוא lengthens to compensate for the inability of the consonants ה and ח to perform…errr…double when they need to.

Anyway, back to the point. When I woke up at 6:45 this morning, it was not yet Election Day in the United States. Yet I’ve been worried about the election all day…when the polls opened it was 2:00 p.m. my time. I had already been worried and anxious for 7 hours and 15 minutes. Awesome. Now we’re finally having some results after a good 21 hours of worrying. Fortunately there are a few of us here, and I splurged on a bottle of bourbon.

The political climate here, which I’ve written a bit about, and will write more about, is an interesting one. Overwhelmingly, the young Israelis (whom I spend time with) tend to support Obama. The young Americans in Israel also tend towards Obama, but slightly less universally. The young Americans who have made Aliya (immigrated) to Israel tend to be much more conservative. One of the new Olim (the plural noun form of Aliya) was telling me about how worried he was, having made this investment to move to Israel that Obama wouldn’t do enough to protect Israeli Interests. I didn’t really push him about what that meant.

In my Ulpan (Hebrew Class) there are a good number of Muslim students. They seem to all be supporters of Obama, whom, Mohammed expressed to me yesterday is more concerned with external issues than McCain.

So I’m going to post this and get back to watching the election. We’re watching it on Fox News International, which is the only channel that is offering full coverage. It’s like regular Fox News, as yellow as yellow journalism can get. BUT it has the added bonus of little three-minute human-interest stories about American Citizens living abroad instead of commercials.

They also seem to be having major technical malfunctions. I think the teleprompter operator must be an Obama supporter and trying to sabotage the uber conservative anchorman. Also, said anchorman just said "Why don't you come on over here, big boy," I don't know why. Maybe we're just too tired and heard it wrong...