Indiana

Tea?d Off

By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz

Apparently fighting incumbent U.S. Senator Dick Lugar isn’t enough for some members of the Indiana Tea Party movement, they’ve now decided to start fighting each other.   I’ve heard rumors for quite a while about growing tension in the movement dating back to their winter gathering in Tipton.  Now things are spilling over onto the Internet and being waged on two fronts.

The first fight is between the Tea Party movement and Freedom Works, the Dick Armey organization that has been teaching tea parties how to organize.  Apparently Armey’s endorsement of Mitch Daniels for President rubbed several of the Tea Party folks the wrong way.  Daniels supports his political mentor Dick Lugar in his Senate re-election bid.  That got the Freedom Works people an earful from tea party activists who were livid at the endorsement.   I’m told that left several Freedom Works organizers scratching their heads and seriously entertaining the thought of taking their resources to some other organization.

The second part of this appears to be over simple egos.  In an e-mail to Fox Business News host Neil Cavuto, Peter Recchio of the Elkhart Tea Party movement with regards to Monica Boyer (who was scheduled to appear on Cavuto’s show) and Greg Fettig of the Hoosiers for Conservative Senate.

We at TEA-MAC, and others in the state movement, are being kidnapped by a small group, Hoosiers for Conservative Senate, recently formed and run by tea party opportunists Monica Boyer and her associate/side-kick Greg Fettig. They simply do not have our movement first at heart, and are in this cause for the most part for personal gain and aggrandizement. This can be corroborated by MANY tea party leaders and general tea party members throughout the state with little research.

Recchio told me that Boyer and Fettig don’t speak for most of the Tea party movement.  I e-mailed Fettig to get his response, however he declined citing Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment that you don’t speak ill of another Republican/Conservative.  Recchio tells me plans to continue his fight.

Like I said, this is not the first time the Tea Party folks have taken political shots at each other,  and some how I get the strange feeling this won’t be the last.

Full post as published by Indiana Barrister on March 31, 2011 (boomark / email).