"In your guts you know he's nuts."

This evening is the 44th anniversary of this. Here's the whole speech to read and/or hear.

Two weeks prior to Goldwater's Republican nomination acceptance speech, this happened. Here's LBJ's speech before signing the Civil Rights Act here. Goldwater had voted against the Act, stating that civil rights should be the concern of the states.

And then Johnson trounced Goldwater in November. Next year, in 1965, came the Voting Rights Act. Politically speaking, 1964 & 65 represented the high water mark of the 20th Century liberal American Consensus. Just three years later, it would unravel, and thus began 40 years of gradual and concerted chipping-away of civil rights, economic opportunity, and fair treatment.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. That remains, at heart, the organizing principle of the Republican Party ... from the gradual but extreme shift of the tax burden onto working families (in defense of the "liberty" of the wealthy), to the tyrannical power-grabs of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Jr. administrations (the defense of the president's "liberty" to do whatever he wants at the extreme expense of the rule of law.)

This election year, with the Republican brand in shambles (perhaps sufficiently exposed as "liberty for me but not for thee"), how fitting that 44 years later another Arizona senator has become the Republican Party's standard-bearer. Here's hoping that Goldwater and McCain represent landslide-losing bookends of a period of right-wing Republican "consensus."

Happy anniversary.