“Unbelievable,” I mumbled to myself as I stood reading the historical marker in the breaking twilight. “If you always do what you always did you’ll always get what you always got, and we’re about to do it again.”

It was a Thursday morning in late July. My trophy wife and I had overnighted in Great Falls with the grandkids and we hit the road well before dawn. I pulled off Highway 89 at the “Old Agency” historical marker on Badger Creek to stretch my legs. The weathered sign explained a tragedy which occurred 127 years ago in Blackfeet Country. The peeling white paint in the engraved letters read:

“…The ‘Starvation Winter’ of 1883-1884 took the lives of about 500 Blackfeet Indians…This tragic event was the result of an inadequate supply of government rations during an exceptionally hard winter. …”

The marker’s words are frighteningly prophetic. The Blackfeet were the largest and most dominant Indian tribe in Montana in the mid 1800’s. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 established their boundaries, but they never fully submitted to the reservation system until 1882. Two years later, 500 of them starved to death.

Don’t you find it ironic a native population which survived hundreds of harsh Montana winters and struck fear in the hearts of their enemies didn’t suffer mass starvation until they surrendered their self-reliance? They fell victim to the deceptive promise from the federal government it was in their best interest to trade liberty for the security of free food, clothing, shelter and healthcare.

I am certain there were Blackfeet patriots who frantically, albeit futilely, urged tribal members not to surrender to the federal government and instead cache their own winter food supply as their ancestors had done. Unfortunately, just like today, those pleas fell on the deaf ears of people blindly mesmerized by the shiny object of getting something for nothing.

Last week, the US House was called back into session to pass yet again, another stimulus bill. The $26 billion bailout is being promoted as an education jobs bill, but it is nothing more than a progressive vote buying gimmick for the 2010 elections. What makes this political move so analogous to the story on the road side marker is $12 billion of this giveaway comes directly from the federal food stamps program. Unlike in 1884, the greatest health threat to America’s poverty class is obesity, so I don’t think mass starvation is on the immediate horizon. Healthcare is the commodity which will be rationed due to a short supply and it is the obligation of the states to nullify Obamacare.

In just 68 days voters go to the polls. Will Americans elect constitutional representatives and reject this cancerous, incessant, federal deficit spending or is the allure of social freebies like Obamacare too tempting to refuse? What say you?