Is the GOP co-opting the tea party movement, or are tea partiers taking down the establishment and sending the RINOs packing?

A lengthy New York Times magazine article this week quoted several establishment Republicans crowing over what they see as the demise of the two-year-old tea party activism.

Bill Kristol, the neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard and a Fox News contributor, said the tea party peddles "an infantile form of conservatism."

Veteran Republican strategist Scott Reed took the disdain one step further, saying the GOP is steadily co-opting the grass-roots movement.

"That’s the secret to politics: trying to control a segment of people without those people recognizing that you’re trying to control them," Reed said of the GOP's assimilation strategy.

This may sound like good news for Barack Obama's beleaguered Democrats, but tea partiers in Florida and nationally say the establishment types have it exactly backward.

"I would just say that we are busy taking over the GOP," said Brendan Steinhauser, director of federal and state campaigns for the national tea party network FreedomWorks.

"It will take us years to do, but we are on track. We are starting with taking over as precinct captains and county GOP chairmen. We are also electing true fiscal conservatives to local, state and national office."

Steinhauser, based in Washington, D.C., reiterated the takeover philosophy of FreedomWorks founder, former Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas:

"This is just the beginning of a process that will take us a long time. But in the end we will prevail." And, Steinhauser predicted, "They will follow us."

Angry with RINOs who seek accommodation and compromise with Democrats, tea partiers recall their breaking points with the party establishment.

For some, it was the nomination and subsequent defeat of "maverick" John McCain. For others, it is hot-button issues like immigration that are finessed or flat-out ignored by pandering party bigwigs.

For almost all, there was a prevailing sense that too many mainstream Republicans had simply lost their way.

"The GOP has been poll-driven, image-driven and abandoned its principles, particularly that of limited government, at the drop of a hat," says Henry Kelley, head of the Fort Walton Beach Tea Party.

"We decided to give the GOP some spine, and run the risk of alienating the public to do the right thing. Now the establishment GOP has a real choice -- accept the grass-roots tea party as is, or co-opt the movement, kill our energy and watch the Occupy Wall Street crowd re-elect Barack Obama."

Danita Kilcullen, who heads Tea Party Fort Lauderdale, sees the Kristol-Reed game afoot.

"I look at the big-money 'national' organizations that now dominate the tea party movement, along with the big-name Republicans who have attached themselves at the helm of such groups, and it certainly does appear to me that they are one-and-the-same.

"I constantly receive requests for donations from these groups. How is this any different from Republican/Democrat parties and PACs that beg year-around for campaign contributions?" Kilcullen wonders.

Kilcullen, who became involved with the Republican Party in the late '90s, doesn't neatly fit the GOP mold. She belongs to Floridians for Legal Immigration to block illegal aliens, and she has picketed alongside activists Rev. O'Neal Dozier, Tom Trento and Joe Kaufman to protest what she calls "jihadi mosques" in South Florida.

"To found and lead a tea party came naturally and is, in fact, a manifestation of a somewhat rebellious or revolutionary nature," she observes.

Patricia Sullivan views herself as more of a patriot than a revolutionary, but she sees the same dangers of co-optation. While Sullivan believes that conservatives have been largely "disenfranchised" by the GOP, she eschews references to rebellion and favors the more diplomatic term, "determination."