I’ve always liked George Will and his contrarian style, blunt commentary and fearless attack on absurdities in public life left and right. His consistent exposures of the excesses of politically correct wokeness are legendary. I even used one of his books in a class I taught on electoral politics at UCSC a couple of decades ago.

However, his recent slander of President Jimmy Carter (Sentinel, Dec. 31 column) within days of the former president’s death demand a response. In his op ed, Will never directly makes any criticisms. Instead, what we get is a compendium of innuendo with respect to the ostensible errors of the Carter administration.

It begins with a vague suggestion that Carter and his early focus on climate change and the need to transition to renewable energy sources, in particular solar power, was somehow responsible for the energy crisis faced by the country when Carter was president. However, that crisis had its roots in the 1973 Arab oil embargo that began as Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries reduced world supplies as part of a strategy to increase oil prices. It was resolved by a combination of the oil reserves that Carter released on the world market and because the OPEC countries got the price increase their strategy sought.

Will’s column implies that somehow Carter was responsible for the Iranian hostage crisis that followed the fall of the Shah in 1979. But that crisis had its roots as far back as the Eisenhower administration when the Dulles brothers (Allen at the CIA and John Foster at the State Department) manufactured the coup that overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran because of his socialist leanings and replaced him with the Shah, whose murderous regime eventually led to the 1979 revolution in Iran. And, although not the only cause, the American CIA once again played a role in that 1979 revolution by undermining the leftist leaning secular students who sparked that revolution in favor of the Islamic forces that eventually seized power in Iran and held the American Embassy workers hostage. The world is still facing the consequences of those decisions in the mess in the Middle East today.

The evidence is still a bit buried, but we need to remember that Carter’s attempts to get the hostages released were seriously undermined by the incoming Reagan administration’s secret dealings with the Iranian government to have the hostages released once Reagan actually got into office — which is what finally happened.

All of this was directly connected to what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, with the Ronald Reagan administration, under the direction of Ollie North, making a trade of American armaments for Iran (our ostensible enemy) for cash, which was then spent to support the illegal and not so secret war of the United States against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as a way of getting around the Congressional ban on such spending. The only reason we don’t have the full details on this scandal is because President Reagan was able to persuade the American public and Congress that either he simply hadn’t know about any of this or that his oncoming Alzheimer’s disease meant he was not really responsible for what happened.

Will loved Reagan and his recent column is suffused with a disturbing willingness (no pun intended) to forget the role that Reagan actually played in so many of our current national and international problems. It was President Reagan who abolished the Revenue Sharing program that gave all of the cities in America funding and led to the rapid and massive explosion of the homeless crisis we still face today. His lack of willingness to address the AIDS crisis that arose under his administration is another of his great accomplishments.

Without any explanation or actual defense, Will scoffs at the idea that in the 1976 campaign Carter called Reagan a racist. The fact that Reagan’s “southern strategy” for election in that year was a plan totally based on racism apparently never happened.

And finally, without an argument, Will dismisses Carter’s famous Camp David speech, in which the former president argued that America’s obsession with unnecessary consumption will not produce ultimate happiness and that we need a better moral purpose to make life meaningful. Carter’s speech makes, perhaps, one of the most important points by any president in the 20th Century.

Carter was a much better president that we ever realized. His admittedly failed attempts to create a moral basis for our foreign and domestic policy remain a key to his legacy. And Will’s slavish adoration of all things Reagan demonstrates a blind spot for which it is hard to forgive him.

Mike Rotkin is a former Mayor of Santa Cruz and teaches in Merrill College at UCSC.