Dana Rohrabacher: “Before I get into the substance of my remarks, I would like to mention a little story. When I used to work for Ronald…”

“Before I get into the substance of my remarks, I would like to mention a little story. When I used to work for Ronald Reagan years ago, he also said: Well, Dana always start off with a little funny story. So I thought I would share one that Ronald Reagan loved with all of you and the Congressional Record and those watching us tonight on C-SPAN. What it deals with is a man who was struggling, struggling to get by. He lived in an area that had very little farmland left. My relatives all came from dirt-poor farms in North Dakota. They didn't have very good land up there. They were homesteaders, and it was rough going. But they did make a go out of it. They made a living out of it. This story is about a fellow in Kentucky, a guy who wanted to be a farmer but couldn't even find any land as good as my parents ended up with when they homesteaded. One day he found a piece of land that he knew was very fertile. What it was was an old riverbed. He decided he could plant that riverbed, and it was such good soil that he would have a great crop. Well, the trouble with it was that the riverbed was filled with tree stumps and rocks and all sorts of weeds and horrible obstructions to get anything done. He spent a year of his life cleaning out that riverbed. Every day after work, he would go and blow up the rocks, haul them out. He would get a mule team and pull the tree stumps out. He would take a machete and cut down all the weeds. The briars would scratch his body.…”