Fear is irrational. When people get scared, they don’t want explanations — they just want to feel safe. And when that happens, they always turn to the hard guys on the right. Which is why the less-than-aggressive response by Obama administration and more particularly the Center for Disease Control’s Tom Frieden to the recent Ebola scare ensures that the Republicans will win a U.S. Senate majority next month. President Obama wouldn’t have decided to appoint a new Ebola czar (Ron Klain has the job) if he wasn’t seriously concerned about Frieden looking like a weak sister over the last several days. If there was even a hair-breadth’s chance that the Republicans might not win, that hope is all but dead now. Frieden’s mild-mannered, bordering-on-milquetoasty responses to questions about his agency not being hard and decisive enough have surely created a sense of elation among Republicans. People who were teetering on the fence now have a reason to go with the hard guys. It’s over. The Right is going to fuck things up horribly between early 2015 and early 2017, and it’s basically due to the Ebola crisis but more particularly to Frieden.