In a private call, the Senate Democratic leader secretly assured Secretary of State John Kerry that he would back the deal, though he would keep quiet about it publicly, Democratic sources said. He promised to help deliver critical information about which Democrats to target – but Reid himself needed to let about a dozen friends, supporters and donors who were sharply critical of the deal know why he was backing it before his position became public.

What ensued was perhaps the most aggressive and coordinated lobbying drive ever to take shape between congressional Democratic leaders and the Obama White House – which have frequently been at odds over strategy and tactics. It was a strategy that focused exclusively on House and Senate Democrats, ignoring Republicans altogether. And it underscored how sensitive the deal was to a number of Democrats, who feared a sharp backlash from pro-Israel voters and their Republican foes.

The Democrats succeeded largely because the lobbying effort to back the deal was far more targeted and relentless than the public push and advertising campaigns aimed at scuttling it, according to lawmakers in both parties. For a president often criticized for being detached from Congress, Obama aggressively used his bully pulpit to win over his party, contacting 125 Democratic House members and senators since July, many of them repeatedly, according to Democratic sources.

Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an opponent of the deal, said his Democratic friends reported to him that the White House was “breaking arms and legs” to prevent Congress from voting down the deal.

And it worked, culminating in a victory where Senate Democrats filibustered a resolution to reject the deal and House Democrats secured enough support to sustain a veto, handing Obama the most far-reaching international achievement of his presidency.

To quell a Democratic uprising, the White House, Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi traded key intelligence about uneasy Democrats, dispatching powerful Cabinet officials to lock down support. Over the August recess, Pelosi gave the White House 57 names of House Democrats who were wobbly on the Iran pact; Obama called all of them, including 30 calls to Democratic lawmakers in between rounds of golf during his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, according to Democratic sources.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin called almost everyone in his 46-member caucus, interrupting a family vacation in Oregon to lobby skittish Democrats. On a jaunt to Florida last week where he talked about his presidential ambitions, Vice President Joe Biden made a side trip to help woo and eventually win over Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, an influential Jewish Democrat who was facing fierce protests, including from some activists who charged that she should “go to the oven,” a reference to the Holocaust.

American Jews who continue idiotically to vote Democratic have become outright enemies not only of Israel but of the survival of Western civilization.  

Senior administration officials made 250 calls to House members and senators, sources said. That includes Jack Lew, the Treasury secretary and an Orthodox Jew, who was dispatched to help alleviate concerns of Jewish lawmakers, and Kerry, a former senator who relied on his longstanding Hill connections to push his party to back the deal.

Yet it was Ernest Moniz, the Department of Energy secretary and a nuclear physicist, who became the most prolific and effective surrogate, lawmakers said.

Moniz headed to the Detroit area to win over Michigan Sen. Gary Peters this summer. After pro-Israel forces were ratcheting up opposition in Montana, Moniz laid out his views to a local newspaper to help ensure Sen. Jon Tester didn’t defect. And he called into a North Dakota radio show to help give political cover to Heidi Heitkamp, the state’s centrist Democratic senator.

Moniz was so influential that the final Democrat who announced her support – Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell – waited to return to Washington to meet with him to let him reassure her about the capability of inspectors to continue to detect nuclear activity in the country. He told them all that the deal cut off Iran’s pathways to building a nuclear bomb.

Reid later privately mused about the possibility of nominating Moniz for the Nobel Peace Prize, according to an aide familiar with the matter.

Moniz was lying, of course. And couldn’t  Maria Cantwell read the deal herself, and consider what the result of a nuclear-armed Iran will be; and note the numerous reports of the “secret” side-deal between Iran and the IAEA which allows the ever cheating, lying Iranian regime to “inspect” itself?

What helped Obama and supporters was the fact that the congressional review law only required the White House to prevent a veto-proof, two-thirds majority from forming in each chamber. With 46 Senate Democrats and 188 House Democrats, that meant limiting defections to fewer than 13 in the Senate and 42 in the House. On Thursday, just four Democrats voted to break a filibuster in the Senate on a motion to disapprove of the Iran deal, keeping the accord alive, with Pelosi’s office announcing it had enough support to sustain a potential veto.

Given the more progressive bent in the House Democratic Caucus, the White House always viewed the House as its firewall – and spent ample resources and time to ensure that the dam didn’t break.

Bit of a mixed metaphor there, but we get the point. So how did he do it?

He used the dim but astoundingly lucky Nancy Pelosi …

Soon after the deal was announced in July, Pelosi announced her backing and worked furiously with the White House to keep Democrats in line. Through August, aides said, Pelosi was on the phone during trips across the country, including in Napa Valley, California, and New Orleans at an event recognizing the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, speaking to every member of her caucus – including some repeatedly.

Democrats still raised major concerns – namely over how Iranian nuclear sites could be inspected, how other countries would react if the U.S. walked away from the deal and whether rolling back sanctions against Iran would empower the country and threaten Israel.

When questions were raised, relevant Cabinet members would try to iron out those concerns. And when the pressure from the President was needed, he would intensify his lobbying.

Pelosi said Thursday that Obama knew the agreement so well he could teach a “masters class” on the topic.

She relied heavily on the President and his team to deliver the key votes. Soon after the deal was announced, Biden traveled to the House Democratic Caucus to lobby his party behind it, followed by visits from Moniz and Kerry. Then the White House focused heavily on small groups, dispatching Wendy Sherman, an under secretary of state, to brief the Congressional Black Caucus in late July.

Right before the August recess, with fears that angry town hall meetings in members’ home states could shift the debate, Obama spent more than two hours in the White House’s Blue Room with two dozen House Democrats, answering questions from skeptical members. In a meeting with 12 House Democrats in late July who were leaning against the plan, Obama convinced half of them to support it, aides said.

“This agreement is not perfect,” Pelosi said Thursday. “But I never have seen a perfect anything.”

Despite losing the support of Schumer, an influential Jewish Democrat who represents a staunchly pro-Israel constituency in New York, Democrats in the Senate were not too concerned it would have a broader impact. Schumer promised not to lobby Democrats to oppose the deal — and Democratic leaders took full advantage of that.

What can one say of a man who knows something is terribly dangerous and wrong, will vote against it, but solemnly undertakes not to tell others how dangerous and wrong it is?

As Reid and senior White House aides were coordinating on strategy, Durbin was calling members of his caucus on his family trip to Oregon in August.

“Wherever we are, we have to do our work – and he was on the phone with me and others the entire time,” Reid said Thursday as Durbin stood next to him.

Throughout the recess, a number of Democrats who supported the deal ended up meeting with fierce opponents in order to explain their line of thinking.

Now comes a particularly sickening part:

Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, ended up meeting with Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, in Miami. He talked with officials from the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, including Holocaust survivors.

“It was one of the most respectful, friendly meetings,” Nelson said.

No anger then? No desperation? No terror? Wow!

Some resisted the White House’s help in order to show their independence from a President who senators said often expressed how important the deal was to him personally.

“I never talked to the President,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat. “I got one call from (national security adviser) Susan Rice. I told them, ‘I don’t want any calls from the administration, so leave me alone.'”

Wonderful! So there was one person who judged the issue for herself?

No.

McCaskill said she eventually backed the deal after consulting with ambassadors of Asian countries over what they would do with Iranian money they were holding if the United States walked away from the agreement.

“Suffice it to say, I am for the agreement,” she said.

Others received attention from the President, among them Peters, the Michigan Democrat, and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who faces a potentially tough re-election next year.

After taking an official trip to the Middle East, Peters invited Moniz to spend time in Detroit answering questions from skeptical voters. He also spoke to Obama twice on the phone, in addition to an Oval Office meeting.

“I still have a lot of concerns,” Peters said Wednesday, though he’s backing the deal because he believes there are no better options.

No better options than to guarantee that Iran will become a nuclear power?

There are a few Democrats who understand what’s at stake:

Privately, Reid worked to ensure that Democrats would be prepared to filibuster the deal – something that infuriated Republicans who wanted a straight-up-or-down vote so Obama would be forced to veto the resolution of disapproval. But at a private lunch Wednesday, Reid convinced his party to join in the filibuster, even as New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez pushed back on that strategy.

Menendez demonstrated that Obama couldn’t win over all of his party. Like Menendez and Schumer, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, opposed the deal. And Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who rarely speaks to the President, announced his opposition after he heard strong criticism at town hall meetings in his state.

The evening before Manchin announced his opposition this week, the President called up the conservative Democrat to get him to flip. Manchin, at home on his boat parked at National Harbor in Maryland, wouldn’t budge.

“He made his pitch, and I respect that,” Manchin said. “I think he knew that I was in a different place.”

“It’s a no-brainer for him,” he continued. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I understand that’.”

In the end, it wouldn’t matter. Republicans fell two senators shy Thursday of breaking a Democratic filibuster, which kept the Iran deal from even coming up for a vote.

How much effort did Republican leaders put in to get the deal voted down? How much has Obama been helped by the slackness, or naivety, or stupidity, or indifference, or secret sympathy of leading Republicans, who could have prevented the victory the Islam-loving president has scored today?

At least the names of those American politicians who voted for this baleful deal, struck by a treacherous US president with an evil Islamic regime, are on record. Their names will be forever attached to the calamity that will ensue.

Almost equally culpable are those who have failed to prevent it, and their names are on it too.

Christopher Swindell is a professor of Journalism at Marshall University in West Virginia. He writes this in the Charleston Gazette (May 30, 2013):

Watching the celebration at the NRA [National Rifle Association] convention over the defeat of background checks was the most nauseating experience of the day.

I am not a New York gun control liberal, either. I support a shotgun for home defense, a handgun for limited conceal/carry, and an assortment of hunting rifles to balance West Virginia’s exploding deer population (as evidenced by hourly collisions with cars). So, I am hardly out of the mainstream.

But, the gun safety debate is B.S. This foaming at the mouth, Obamar is coming for the guns, Nanny Bloomberg is a bad billionaire, and most despicable of all, those survivors and victims are pawns in the liberal agenda is knuckle-dragging Cretan talk.

Is Obama not coming for the guns? Is Bloomberg not behaving like a nanny when he rules on how much soda people may buy in one cup “for their own good”? Are all Americans not pawns in the liberal – ie Obama administration’s – agenda?

And no matter how many times Sen. Joe Manchin tries to explain his compromise (a decent attempt thwarted by extremists), the hard right lies and foams. The repeated lies now seem like the truth, what with the likes of Sen. Kelly Ayotte telling them.

Apparently he only has to say the name of Senator Kelly Ayotte (for whose position on gun control see here) to conjure up a set of connotations at which his fellow liberals (though not those of the “New York gun control” type who are apparently too extreme for Mr Swindell) to nod in harmonious disdain.

Probably the most serious miscalculation opponents make is the guest list for the NRA speaker’s podium. To let the half-wit half-term quitter Sarah Palin have a microphone is to alienate the very people Republicans need to work with on future legislation. To say nothing of the other speakers.

Sarah Palin is an extraordinary (and beautiful) woman. She hunts and fishes to put food on her family’s table. She and her husband built their own house. She was an able governor of Alaska. Chosen by the lackluster John McCain to be his running-mate for the presidency in 2008, she energized his campaign and drew the eyes of the nation to her as the star she is. When  Obamacare was no more than a dark nebulous menace, she spotted that it would inevitably set up the “death panels” which it does. But because they do not agree with her; because she did not go to an ivy-league university; because she is not one of that class of intellectual snobs aptly called by Thomas Sowell the “self-anointed”, she is treated by them not only with most illiberal scorn, but is actively persecuted, bullied, maligned, libeled. The snobs have even sunk so low as to malign and libel her children. Every brave, moral, decent thing she does – such as deciding not to have an abortion when she knew her child would be born with Down Syndrome – is mocked and spat upon by those arbiters and models of good taste, refined sensibility, superior breeding and costly education. They confuse intelligence with the acquisition of university degrees. She did not go to Harvard, so she is a “half-wit”. As for her being a quitter – meaning that she left the governorship because a campaign of frivolous and cruel litigation was mounted against her – the critics should consider how little time Barack Obama devoted to anything in his life before he became president.

And how does choosing a white, rich old man with an offensive degrading speech about the war of “Northern Aggression” as NRA president forward a sense of reasonableness? History lesson: It was an awful Civil War won decisively some 150 years ago. Over slavery. The Confederacy wanted to keep African-Americans in chains and President Lincoln didn’t.

Ah yes, to be white is eternally unforgiveable (unless you are on the Left). To be rich is so nasty it ought to be criminalized (unless you are on the Left  – or believe in nanny government like billionaire Mayor Bloomberg).

The Civil War  was indeed “awful”. Some 620,000 people lost their lives in it. It was fought to keep the Union together. Whether  rightly or wrongly is still a subject of dispute, while nobody now supports slavery except Islam.

Sure, there were states’ rights issues, but nullification, secession, and treason were settled at Appomattox Courthouse. Sure, Reconstruction left a bad taste. But, resurrecting these same things, the way South Carolina is as we speak, is to invite a return to the whole concept of a Union.

Here it is. The NRA advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America.

We did not hear and have not found NRA speeches advocating “armed rebellion against the duly elected government”. But if they were made, we doubt that the speakers meant now. If they meant that one of the reasons citizens should freely own guns is to defend themselves against a tyrannical government, they were surely right. And the trend of the Obama government is ever more towards dictatorship and tyranny.

That’s treason, and it’s worthy of the firing squad. The B.S. needs a serious gut check. We are not a tin pot banana republic where machine gun toting rebel groups storm the palace and depose the dictator.

We put the president in the White House.

A part of the electorate put this one there, making the biggest mistake in US history.

To support the new NRA president’s agenda of arming the populace for confrontation with the government is bloody treason. And many invite it gladly as if the African-American president we voted for is somehow infringing on their Constitutional rights.

There we go. Mentioning that he is “African-American” is the hint that all who are against him are motivated by race prejudice.

And that is followed by  a threat of overwhelming fire-power in defense of their immaculate values:

Normally, I am a peaceable man, but in this case, I am willing to answer the call to defend the country. From them.

To turn the song lyric they so love to quote [?] back on them, “We’ll put a boot in your —, it’s the American way.”

Except it won’t be a boot. It’ll be an M1A Abrams tank, supported by an F22 Raptor squadron with Hellfire missiles. Try treason on for size. See how that suits. And their assault arsenal and RPGs won’t do them any good.

So, to return to reality, all of us. Let’s make common sense gun safety a deciding issue for 2014 and beyond. The NRA certainly has. Let’s push back. We the People. The 85 percent who support more robust background checks. And when the next domestic terrorist with an assault rifle comes along, we can blame the leaders and fringe of the NRA for arming them.

So this whole rant was over less or more “robust background checks”. And whether less or more, if a mass murderer comes along with an assault rifle, the great thing is that the Left can blame the NRA for arming him. You only get reasoning like that among the brilliant self-anointed.