[Ruth Marcus is a columnist for the Washington Post.]

The campaign video is such a transparent ploy, the temptation is to ignore it. After all, Tea Party candidate Rick Barber is a long shot in his July runoff race for the Republican nomination for an Alabama congressional seat.

But then you hit replay, and see again the iconic images, you think you must have imagined. They last a fraction of a second, but they are so imprinted on the modern brain that is all it takes to recognize the photographs. Arbeit Macht Frei, spelled out in cold metal on the concentration camp gates. And the skeletal survivors, packed naked in bunks four tiers high....

Barber was unapologetic. "We can't be so naive to think that just because we live in America that can't happen to us," he said. "We are being fed a socialist agenda spoon by spoon, and we don't see it coming. In Germany, when Hitler was first elected under the Socialist Party, no one would have thought in a million years it would have gone where it did."

I would not have thought in a million years that this kind of thinking would be inside the conservative mainstream. If it is not, it is time for rational conservatives to speak up.