It seems like these days every time the Truman National Security Project is in the news it is because of a debate over how ashamed the think tank’s inspiration, Harry Truman, would be of its latest antics. In late 2011, the Truman Project expelled former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block because of his decision to push back publicly on leftists close to the Obama administration for their anti-Israel invective. And now it has sunk to a level that embarrassed even its founder Rachel Kleinfeld. But it answered a very important question about the Obama administration’s Iran diplomacy in the process.

Yesterday, the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo revealed that the Truman Project, which is aligned with the Obama White House and whose board of advisors includes Michele Flournoy, had initiated a rather heavyhanded call to arms to rally support for President Obama’s attempt to ink a deal on Iran’s nuclear program with Tehran. On an internal email list, the group appeared ready to support whatever deal eventually emerges, if a deal does emerge, from the negotiations. But they seemed even more interested in attacking those with reservations about the deal.

“Our community absolutely must step up and not cede the public narrative to neocon hawks that would send our country to war just to screw the president,” Graham F. West, Truman’s writing and communications associate, wrote, according to Kredo. And he claimed, as the president often does, that the choice was essentially between war and peace, with no gray area.

Then today, Kredo followed up with another scoop of internal communications from the Truman Project. While the earlier batch of emails showed the Truman Project slandering skeptics of an Iran deal as animated simply by partisanship and willing to send Americans to war just to mess with the president, the second batch showed an equally unhinged effort to get Truman scholars to question the patriotism of anyone who opposes Obama on the issue:

“If they [Congress] kill the deal, they should be blamed for the consequences,” [David Solimini, Truman’s vice president for strategic communications] wrote. “Congress gave the president the tools he needed to make sure Iran was isolated and under massive pressure. Now they need to support what they started so that we can keep up our end of the bargain.”

Solimini then suggests a “good line” that advocates can use: “Congress is the home team. They better keep rooting for an American win.”

“Handling opposition to a deal” also is addressed in the talking points.

Those who would “be against any deal, even before they know what it is” are “shameful,” according to Solimini’s document.

In what may prove to be one of the document’s more controversial passages, Solimini recommends that Truman allies push back against those who insist, “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

That last part is important, both because Obama himself has said that line and because the Obama administration’s obvious desperation in getting any deal they can has contributed mightily to the impression that he doesn’t mean it. One of the recent suggestions, for example, was that Iran disconnect some pipes, so they’d have to–gasp!–reconnect them when they felt like it.

So the president obviously believes that any deal is better than no deal, and the Truman Project is on board with this nonsense, ready to publicly question the patriotism of those with reservations about the administration’s recklessness. It shows that even in the quarters that are supposed to be providing the intellectual firepower for the nuke deal, false choices and mischaracterizations are all we get. The Obama administration’s behavior can’t be defended on its merits, even from its defenders.

And it reveals something significant. As Kleinfeld (who is no longer with the organization) tweeted when the first story broke, the U.S. should only agree to an Iran deal if it’s a good deal, “not for partisanship.” The Truman Project’s “all-hands-on-deck effort” is a classic case of projection. It warns of the pure partisanship of its opponents when the opposite is true. Skepticism toward Iran’s intentions and the wisdom of striking a weak deal is actually bipartisan.

Today Republican Senator Mark Kirk and Democratic Senator Bob Menendez (the latter the outgoing chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) declared “they would push for more penalties against Tehran if they are unhappy with any nuclear deal, signaling a potential battle with the Obama administration less than two weeks before the deadline for an agreement.”

Indeed, the Obama administration strategy that emerged even before the Republicans won back control of the Senate was to find a way to go it alone. The president knows that, as usual, opposition to his plans is bipartisan, and that even with control of the Senate he would struggle getting a treaty through. Congress has vowed to push back, but the only reason they have anything to push back on is that Obama is strongly considering pretending the treaty isn’t a treaty and going around the Senate to strike a deal.

The naked partisanship, in other words, is completely on one side–Obama’s. And the Truman Project is just the latest to demonstrate this reality.