When Courage Ducks and Covers

 As the U.S. Senate debates Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina has stepped forward to voice serious concerns.

Tillis delivered a sharp, substantive critique—one of the most forceful GOP floor rebukes in recent memory. He focused on real consequences for North Carolina, highlighted broken promises, and warned of fallout—all while avoiding a direct clash with Trump.

While I applaud his focus and concern for his constituents, a few things need to be pointed out.

Quoting Senator Tillis directly, he said:

"The last time I saw a promise broken around healthcare, with respect to my friends on the other side of the aisle, is when somebody said, 'If you like your healthcare, you could keep it. If you like your doctor, you could keep it.' We found out that wasn’t true."

First of all, that’s misleading. If you lost a plan you “liked” under the Affordable Care Act, it’s likely because:

• The plan didn’t meet minimum coverage standards, or

• The insurance company changed or dropped it—not the government.

That distinction matters because it reveals a particular exercise that allows people to pretend the Republican Party makes sense. It’s called ostriching.

Ostriching is deliberately ignoring or avoiding unpleasant facts, problems, or realities—like “burying your head in the sand,” hoping and pretending it all makes sense. It’s a form of denial, and virtually every member of the Republican Party practices it consistently and repetitively—from elected representatives to the man on the street.

Anyone who supports Donald Trump must necessarily practice ostriching.

If you really believe his rants about electric boats, or little boys going to school and coming home as little girls—having undergone unauthorized sexual reassignment surgery during the school day—then either you’re as unwell as he is, or you're burying your head so deep you’ve forgotten what daylight looks like.

If you voted for the guy who was literally screaming during a nationally televised debate, “They are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats,” then either you’re living in a bubble of misinformation or clinging to ignorance like a security blanket. And if, after watching the events of January 6 live on TV—after hours of video footage, police testimony, and over 1,200 federal charges—you’re still willing to accept the party line that it was “a peaceful protest,” or “Antifa in disguise,” or “a setup by the FBI,” then you’re so deep in denial, even the ostriches are planning an intervention. Ostriching requires you to be intellectually dishonest with yourself.

But back to Tillis. He criticizes the bill for gutting Medicaid and breaking promises to North Carolinians, but he doesn’t propose concrete amendments or demand immediate changes. Instead, he floats vague ideas like “go back to the House version” or “slow down the process.”

("Slow down" is another throwback to the Obamacare debate—they kept begging, “Let’s slow down and get this right.”)

For all the GOP’s talk about Obamacare being the apocalypse—and “Repeal and Replace”—they had years of majorities to do just that, and delivered nothing but bad tweets and worse repeal bills. (Still nothing about the “Replace” part.)

Acknowledging the disaster but refusing to act meaningfully to stop it is, once again, ostriching. It’s like sounding the fire alarm, then standing around watching the building burn—because calling out the arsonist (Trump) might hurt your standing in the party.

Most importantly, he threw Trump a bone:

“I’m telling the President that you have been misinformed. You supporting the Senate mark will hurt people. It will hurt the people that you promised to protect.”

Tillis stops short of directly blaming Trump, instead shifting the blame to unnamed advisers or staff, suggesting the President doesn’t fully understand the damage the bill would do, particularly to Medicaid in states like North Carolina.

That’s not principle. It’s willful ignorance posing as pragmatism, a coward’s calculus dressed in Senate decorum, and a polished shrug timed for the evening news. If you’re implying Trump is too stupid to come up with these plans, fine—but don’t act like he’s not driving them. He isn’t some passive bystander being misled by rogue staffers. He is, in fact, driving—and recklessly, I might add.

What confuses me, though, is this: when Trump threatens to “primary” you ('primary?', apparently, we’re verbing random modifiers now), you decide you’re not going to run again. Why does that make any sense?

If you’re standing up for the rights of North Carolinians, why would Republican North Carolinians not vote for you? And even if you ran and lost in a primary, how is that worse than folding like a lawn chair in a windstorm?

And yet the early position of the pundits is that he’s somehow doing an honorable thing. So what’s the message to like-minded Republicans? If you disagree with Trump, pass your knee pads to someone with fewer scruples and no objections to a locked dressing room.

At some point, we have to stop mistaking strategic silence for courage and tactical retreat for leadership. If you recognize the danger but won’t name it, challenge it, or do anything to stop it, then you’re not part of the resistance—you’re part of the routine.

Tillis may have stepped toward the truth, but until Republicans stop offering half-measures and hushed warnings while enabling the same chaos they quietly fear, we’ll keep watching this party—this country—march deeper into the sand, heads down, ears closed, waiting for someone else to be the grown-up in the room.

The ostriches are no longer considering holding an intervention. They’re planning a coup.

... I'm just saying