One name that hasn’t surfaced yet in respect of the floundering by the federal government in the face of Ebola is Michael Bloomberg. Yet it was the former mayor of New York City who gave the nation Thomas Frieden, who is one dangerous doctor and is the middle of the catastrophe. Mr. Bloomberg made him New York City’s Commissioner of Mental Hygiene,* which is a post that tries to re-educate New Yorkers so that they will accept passively living like socialists.

Now Dr. Frieden directs the Centers for Disease Control, where he wants to do the same thing. He is emerging as what the New York Times, in a story on page one of its Web site this morning, calls the “face of the nation’s worry” and also, in respect of Ebola, the Obama administration’s “flawed response.” Because of the government’s blunders in the Ebola emergency, people are starting to look a harder look at Bloombergism.

The Wall Street Journal is out this morning with a particularly fabulous editorial, “The Ebola Twilight of Public Institutions.” It reports that the Ebola tragedy is “ruthlessly exposing the decay of the once-eminent public institutions that were established to contain such transnational contagions—organizations both international and domestic.” It is unsparing in its criticism of the WHO, which it would defund, and calls the failures of the CDC even “more disquieting.”

Another piece is the column by Michelle Malkin in this morning’s New York Post. She points out that the CDC budget has soared more than 200% since 2000 to $7 billion. The Centers, moreover, are squandering this lucre (which was seized from the American public via taxes) on regulating motorcycle helmets, video games, and playground equipment, as if any of that has anything to do with diseases. No wonder that when Ebola hits, the CDC seems to be staggering.

We don’t know Mayor Bloomberg or Dr. Frieden well (the latter we met but once). Our beef with them is the way they have extended the ideology of public health into American politics without putting any of these policies to a vote. Mr. Bloomberg is enormously invested in this through the school of public health at Johns Hopkins. Do Americans want a cabal of left-wing, government doctors in Atlanta engineering our playgrounds, motorcycle helmets, and video games? No one plays a video game or rides a motorcycle for his health.

It would be an absurdity to talk about the silver lining to the Ebola crisis. But it would not be absurd to suggest that in this country the exploitation of the public health laws for ideological ends is a serious abuse. It is important that the Ebola emergency is starting to get people thinking about the first principles of the Centers for Disease Control. We called for the resignation of Dr. Frieden on October 2, after his first national broadcast on Ebola made it clear that he was stumbling. We need leadership that is far more aggressive and far less burdened with the ideology of Bloombergism.

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* Technically the title is Commissioner of Health and Mental Hygiene. It is often contracted to Commissioner of Health, but The New York Sun Reporters Handbook and Manual of Style recommends defaulting to Commissioner of Mental Hygiene.