ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP TO THE LEFT FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY

  On July 20, 1969 I was a 19 year old Airman 1st Class stationed at Kingsley Field Oregon. My wife Debbie and I had invited some military friends, and their wives, over for a moon landing party. As an American I was filled with pride and awe watching our country do something that no other country was capable of at the time. It had been a long, and at sometimes scary ride, while having a front row seat, watching the space race from the age of seven. In 1957 the Russians were able to put Sputnik into orbit. I remember standing in my front yard on Brookside Court and watching Sputnik streaking across the night sky in amazement with my parents and neighbors.

  I was too young to realize how worried my parents generation was about the implications of what the Russians had done. They were thinking that if they can put a satellite into space they can also reach our shores with nuclear warheads. This event shook my parents generation to the core and the Federal government began to think seriously about getting into space. It would be not be until John Glenn's Mercury 6 flight on February 20, 1962, just eight days before my twelfth birthday, that we were even able to successfully orbit the earth with a manned spacecraft. Russian Yuri Gagarin had done it ten months earlier on April 12, 1961. Just over a month later, John Kennedy, a Democrat president, issued a bi-partisan challenge to the nation before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961. He said that America would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, answered that challenge on July 20,1969.

  This bi-partisan effort was an outgrowth of the effort it took to defeat the Nazi's and the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. From scratch we built the worlds first nuclear weapons, over a four year period, and defeated two vicious enemies in a two front war. After Pearl Harbor there were very few isolationists on either side of the political aisle. Most were pulling together for the good of the country because there were patriots in both political parties. Congress was chock full of WW2 veterans from both parties, well up until the 1980's and into the 1990's. This was because sixteen million men and women served in WW2. Due to the infiltration of Communist radicals into the Democrat Party in 1972 their influence has grown to the point that the Democrat Party is virtually all communist today. I foolishly thought for a few days after September 11th that the patriotic spirit, and can do spirit of my youth would return but the leftists in the media, and our government, would not let that happen. America faces new challenges in space, especially from the Chinese. It is my belief that space will be the battlefield of the future, and whoever dominates space will dominate the earth. If it happens I for one want it to be us. With the growing communist influence in our government I cannot envision a Democrat president putting our country's welfare above partisan politics ever again.