W. Todd Akin: “Thank you very much. I'm just so thankful for your willingness to take this special hour and organize things here on the…”

“Thank you very much. I'm just so thankful for your willingness to take this special hour and organize things here on the floor of the U.S. Congress, and your leadership. The people of Minnesota are blessed to have you, and I'm just very thankful to be able to be a small part. But one of the things that those of us who are Members of Congress do, as you can imagine, is that we do give speeches. We talk to different groups of people, young and old, on all kinds of different issues. But one of the questions that I love to ask, and it's something that we should know the answer to rather quickly, and yet, most Americans don't really have the answer quite on the tips of their tongues, and that would be to ask the question, what is it that has made America such a unique and a special place for all of us to live? Now, if you live here, sometimes you can take for granted some of the things that we enjoy every day. But America is extremely different. First of all, there are all these people from other countries that want to come here because they believe that this is the land of opportunity; this is where your dreams can become true. Aside from that, America has been engaged in a number of huge and colossal wars. We find ourselves as the dominant military power on the planet. And so through these different wars, did we create empires? Did we build kingdoms? The answer is, of course, no. We have named no emperors, no kings.…”