Pick Up The Damn Phone

I just got off the phone to my Congresscritturs:  Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and Joe Kennedy.  I spoke to aides at each place, thanking Senator Warren for her support for the Iran deal, and urging in the strongest possible terms that Senator Markey and Rep. Kennedy pull their fingers out and do the same.

The bad guys are hitting the airwaves, the junkets, the phones hard on this one.  President Obama got this one right: the anti-deal folks include all those who screwed up the Iraq call.  We shouldn’t — we must not — let the nation listen to them again.

To that end: aeons ago I did a summer’s worth of answering the phone on Capitol Hill for a congressman.  I’ve asked, and what was true then is still true: phone calls make a difference to these people — and you’d be surprised how few calls can make a difference.

So get on the phone.  Call your representatives.

House of Representatives numbers.

Senate numbers.

Thank your peeps if they’ve already got this one right:  affirmation matters a lot to them.  If they are still thinking, urge them POLITELY to come out in favor of the deal.  Tell them how disappointed you are, how angry, how motivated for change you have become if they tell you that they’re going to try to block the deal.  (Again — do so politely, but firmly.  That’s vastly more scary to them than bluster.)

If you want a great quick review of the arguments for the deal, there’s no better place to start that James Fallows. This post and this one will put you ahead of the entire neo-con policy apparat.*

In any event.  Call. Call now. Get your friends to get on the horn. It matters.

*This one opens with a longer list of Fallows’ arguments for the deal in the context of an opponents view.  The asymmetry of intellectual power will, I think, speak for itself.

Image:  attibuted to Joseph Hauber, Unsterblichkeit – Falter, Knollenblätterpilz und Schlange,** before 1834.

**translation help, anyone?