Nicholas Kristof also worries about Obama’s rhetoric on the nuclear deal:

Obama’s rhetoric was counterproductive. As former Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, told me, “At this point, the president has made it impossible for a Republican to vote for it.”

It’s hard to take this complaint seriously. First, it was always very likely that every Republican in the Senate (except maybe Jeff Flake) was already going to vote against the deal, so it’s not as if there were a lot of undecided Republicans that were suddenly alienated by sharp criticism directed at their colleagues. It’s also not clear what sort of rhetoric a supporter of the deal could use that would win over Republican members of Congress that seem virtually unanimous in their hostility to any deal that might be negotiated in the real world. In general, worrying about upsetting people that are reflexively opposed to your policies is a waste of time and effort. If Obama and other supporters of the deal were making false claims about the deal’s opponents, it would be fair to object to that, but this isn’t what has happened. Supporters of the deal are supposed to refrain from saying true, inconvenient things because they might irritate the people that want to sabotage the agreement. These same people that invoke Munich in every other sentence in every debate are suddenly offended by overwrought language.

If nonproliferation were actually a top priority for Iran hawks, it ought to be fairly easy to win their support for this deal, which is quite sound with respect to the nonproliferation goals that Iran hawks have claimed to share. However, we have seen over the last two years that hyping the threat from Iran’s nuclear program was just one way for them to exaggerate the threat from Iran, and inflating that threat is naturally what interests Iran hawks much more than a diplomatic agreement that reduces it. Now that the nuclear issue has been addressed, they want to change the subject to everything else that the deal doesn’t cover and then fault the administration for not linking the deal to all of these other issues. This is what I’ve called hawkish whataboutism, and there’s no use in trying to answer whataboutist objections because they are by definition spurious and designed to distract from the real issue at hand.