Monday, November 19, 2012

Is there something brewing for Conservative Chairman Kassar to get control over the Brooklyn T. E. A. Party --- and then for somebody to set up a Tea Party Caucus inside the Brooklyn GOP ?


The buzz is that there is a move afoot to turn the small grassroots Brooklyn T.E.A  Party into  astroturf for the Brooklyn Conservative Party run by State Senator Martin Golden's Chief of Staff Gerry Kassar.


Right now, the President of the Brooklyn Tea Party, Joseph Hayon, is completely beholden to 41st AD Republican Committeeman Anthony Testaverde, who is both an insider in Craig Eaton's Brooklyn GOP establishment and one of State Senator Martin Golden's staff employees.

Another person who bears close scrutiny is the Brooklyn T.E.A. Party's current "Number Two Man"  —   Cartrell Gore, who is an enrolled member of Gerry Kassar’s Brooklyn Conservative Party and who had arranged for the Conservative Party Chairman to speak at yesterday’s Brooklyn T.E.A. Party meeting at  Joe’s Dream Burger on the subject, “WHERE DO CONSERVATIVES GO FROM HERE?”  Simultaneously to all of that , the Brooklyn T.E.A. Party is trying establish a separate power base inside the Brooklyn GOP organization by forming what they want to call “The Brooklyn Republican Committee TEA Party Caucus”  If we simply connect the dots, it doesn't take much to see that there's another move by Kassar and the Conservative Party in the direction of being the tail that wags the  Republican Party dog.

The Brooklyn T.E.A. Party has had a rocky history. In the beginning it was headed by a Manhattanite, John Kenneth Press, a crypto-rightist who re-styled his world view, "Culturism," into a very narrow-focused rant principally aimed against the building of mosques at the "Ground Zero" Burlington Coat factory site in lower Manhattan and in the Sheepshead Bay-Brighton Beach community in Brooklyn. Since 2010 this tiny local off-shoot of the national Tea Party movement has been operated by Joseph Hayon, an Orthodox Jewish student and sometime teacher. Under his leadership the Brooklyn T.E.A. Party has remained small, and there was even an attempt by members loyal to the Brooklyn GOP to set up a counter-Brooklyn Tea Party, which faded completely in less than a year. In any case Hayon has made it clear that he has no intention of merging the Brooklyn T.E.A. Party with any other local Tea Party affiliates like the Brooklyn-Queens Tea Party Patriots, The Staten Island Tea Party Patriots and/or the Staten Island Tea Party.

At this critical juncture in conservative Republican activism in Brooklyn, the failure to have any significant Tea Party presence in the few possibly conservative areas of Brooklyn is more than disappointing, it is embarrassing. Already, too many Republican congressmen  have expressed a willingness to support for an Obama compromise that would be a major victory for the President. A Brooklyn Tea Party needs to goad all sitting Republicans to do the right thing. That can't be done if a chief of staff of one of the few elected Republicans in the area is able to take over the Brooklyn T.E.A. Party.




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