Time for 'Rational Conservatives' to Speak Up

It's easy to write off the campaign ads of Tea Party candidate Rick Barber in Alabama as the ravings of someone on the fringe, writes Ruth Marcus. But his latest—in which he equates taxes to slavery and uses images of Holocaust victims—is not only "sacrilegious" but "emblematic of the dangerous take-back-our-country rhetoric that is spread on the conservative airwaves and fueling the Tea Partiers," she writes in the Washington Post.

Barber may indeed be on the fringe of this movement, "but he is not alone there, and he is a predictable outgrowth of it." You don't need much of an imagination to think that someone out there is going to go beyond rhetoric to action. "I would not have thought in a million years that this kind of thinking would be inside the conservative mainstream," writes Marcus. "If it is not, it is time for rational conservatives to speak up." (More conservatives stories.)