More Americans have been married to Rush Limbaugh than killed by the Ebola virus.

Of the seven patients treated in the United States this Halloween/election season, only two contracted it here. They were nurses infected through contact with the one and only patient ever to die of Ebola on U.S. soil.

Meanwhile, nine Americans have been killed in school shootings this year; three in Friday’s ambush in a high school cafeteria near Seattle. That’s down from 35 in 2013. About 500 Americans die of the flu each year despite the ubiquitous availability of vaccine.

To recap: One Ebola victim has died on U.S. soil. Ever. Nine Americans were gunned down at school this year. The flu will claim about 500 Americans over the next six months and at least four women have willingly exposed themselves to Rush Limbaugh’s bodily fluids since 1977.

All of a sudden, Ebola doesn’t seem so bad.

Unless you’re watching Fox “News” or listening to Limbaugh, the chief mouthpiece of the Right Wing Fear Machine. Since Monday, he has linked the government’s refusal to stop flights from Ebola-afflicted countries with illegal immigration. He also suggested the evil President Barack Hussein Obama and other America-haters (Democrats) think we deserve an Ebola outbreak as payback for slavery.

It’s nutty stuff, even for Rush, but Mr. Obama unwittingly helped fan the flames with his typically aloof, science-based approach to the issue. When health care workers who had been exposed to Ebola started hopping planes to Cleveland and New York, it was panic time. With the midterm elections looming, President Ebola needed to be Seen Doing Something.

So he appointed an “Ebola Czar.” Did he pick a doctor? An epidemiologist? A square-jawed, Clint Eastwood type who could growl down public doubt? Nope. He went with Flounder from “Animal House.” Ron Klain may be qualified for the job, but image-wise, he’s a dud, a gift to Republican fear-mongers selling ghost stories about an America constantly under siege.

Spooked Democrats are avoiding the president like a plague. Some won’t vote for his Surgeon General pick because the candidate dared call gun violence a public health issue, angering the NRA. Meanwhile, Fox and Rush paint grim scenes of Ebola-infected hordes of black and brown “illegals” slipping over the border and into the neighborhoods of Real Americans (Republicans).

MSNBC, the Fox of the left, has done its best to defend President Ebola, but it’s hard to trust a “news” outlet that employs the Rev. Al Sharpton. Slamming shameless race-baiters looks funny when your network employs one.

No virus is more contagious than fear, and right-wingers know how to spread it. A meme making the rounds on the Internet asks: “Are you safer now from Ebola and beheading than you were six years ago?”

Well, yes, as I have never been at risk of either. I feel infinitely more threatened by a Supreme Court that decides cash is speech and that corporations are people, state judges who email pornography or a governor who believes energy companies will abandon the Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas if we charge a nominal extraction tax they pay everywhere else.

There is no need to dream up bogeymen. This season, they are everywhere.

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, still needs a flu shot. Contact the writer: kellysworld@timesshamrock.com, @cjkink on Twitter. Read his daily blog at blogs.thetimes-tribune.com/kelly