During last year’s Ebola scare, the Obama administration unveiled a so-called strategy to contain the deadly virus in African nations — a strategy that, as Republicans warned it would, proved futile. According to the latest available data from the CDC, the current outbreak took the lives of more than 10,500 victims, and by the time America responded most of the damage had been done. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported, “[A]fter spending hundreds of millions of dollars and deploying nearly 3,000 troops to build Ebola treatment centers, the United States ended up creating facilities that have largely sat empty: Only 28 Ebola patients have been treated at the 11 treatment units built by the United States military, American officials now say. Nine centers have never had a single Ebola patient.” So far, nearly $1.4 billion in taxpayer money has gone toward African Ebola relief — and for what? “The American response, it turns out, was outpaced by the fast-moving and unpredictable disease,” the Times claims. But as Mark Alexander noted in October, “Obama and his fellow Democrats thrive on manufactured crises, and the current endless loop of hyperbolic rhetoric about the ‘Ebola epidemic crisis’ from all corners of the 24-hour news recyclers has diverted voter attention from the real national security crisis — the re-emergent epidemic of terrorism in the Middle East.” Fast forward to today, and there’s nary a peep about Ebola. But at least the midterms are over.