Club for Growth is not a special interest group

One of Kirk Humphreys' many underhanded attacks on Tom Coburn is that Coburn is a hypocrite on campaign finance reform because he took money from the Club for Growth, which also ran ads in support of Coburn. Either Humphreys doesn't have the intellectual powers to draw careful distinctions or else he's deliberately distorting the truth in hopes of stopping Coburn from winning an outright majority on Tuesday.

Club for Growth is not a PAC that was started to promote the interests of a certain industry or labor union or foreign country. Club for Growth has this to say about itself:

Our members help elect candidates who support the Reagan vision of economic growth through limited government and lower taxes.

Here's how the Club works for you to make your political contributions count:

1. Join now -- it's free!

2. Get our MEMBERS ONLY recommendations on the best candidates in the most important House and Senate races in the country.

3. Contribute to the candidates you like best through the Club for Growth -- and 100% of the money goes to the candidate's campaign. You can contribute to several candidates online or off without having to go to the mailbox, find addresses for candidates, or write multiple checks.

4. Your contribution is combined with thousands of other Club members for maximum impact!

In other words, they find principled candidates committed to sound fiscal policy, endorse them, then encourage their members to donate to their campaigns. Club for Growth has encouraged challengers to Republican office-holders who truly are RINOs (Republicans in name only) when it comes to federal spending and tax policy. Tom Coburn should be proud to have the support and recognition of Club for Growth.

And Kirk Humphreys should be ashamed of trying to paint such a distorted picture of Tom Coburn. He knows better. Someone suggested he was a good man receiving some bad advice, which suggests that he's easily manipulated by the unscrupulous and too weak to control his own campaign. I don't have a problem with negative campaigning that paints an honest picture. I object to campaign ads which take the facts out of context.

I guess it was easy to promise a positive campaign when he felt sure he was going to win. If Kirk Humphreys had been willing to lose gracefully, he would have had a future in Oklahoma politics, maybe as a candidate for governor, maybe as a congressman or even a senator. Not now. He's dead politically. What a shame.