Let's look at Barry Goldwater's comment from a different angle.
From www.politico.com
GOP base rejects calls to moderate
A quick tour through the week’s headlines suggests the Republican Party is beginning to come to terms with the last election and that consensus is emerging among GOP elites that the party needs to move away from discordant social issues.
But outside Washington, the reality is very different. Rank-and-file Republicans remain, by all indications, staunchly conservative, and they appear to have no desire to moderate their views. GOP activists and operatives say they hear intense anger at the White House and at the party’s own leaders on familiar issues – taxes, homosexuality, and immigration. Within the party, conservative groups have grown stronger absent the emergence of any organized moderate faction.
The final rallying cry of the dying GOP is Senator Barry Goldwater's famous line in his 1964 presidential speech:
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!"
And upon those fourteen words, the last remnants of a once great political party have taken their last stand. It is the very heart and soul of the ultra-right which has taken compleat control of the Republican party. They are a minority within a minority. But just as nature abhors a vacuum so do leaderless political parties. And they have rushed in to fill that void and instead of statesmen and congressional leaders they have anointed the triumvirate of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck to lead them back to glory.
Perhaps they may want to read a bit more of Senator Barry Goldwater Goldwater gave so many years ago. They might find that Goldwater would be appalled by the way his words have been twisted and distorted. In another section of the speech he said:
"Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism."
There has not been a better condemnation of the extremists on the right than these prescient words spoken 45 years ago by the then leader of the right wing of the Republican party. For with those words, Goldwater warns America to beware those who sally forth with the flags held high proclaiming that they and they alone are the nation's salvation. They and they alone are keepers and defender of the truth and the faith. Those words are as relevant and powerful today as they were then.
Too bad none of those at whom they are directed will ever read them.