Someone informed me today that the White House has decided to stop invoking Spain’s “green jobs” experience. This is on the heels of a devastating report widely carried in U.S. and Spanish media revealing that this supposed example for America to follow was actually a bit of a disaster — one that Spain had been hoping we would help bail them out of by buying into, specifically by buying their windmills and solar panels. The latter objective comes to us courtesy of the head of Spain’s renewable-energy association, who was reduced to calling the study’s author unpatriotic for letting the cat out of the bag, and who would save them now?

Gee, think the author was on to something?

Now if this latest Obama reversal is true, this also is a walk-back from the administration’s rather clumsy and prideful doubling-down after the study was first reported — when they defiantly continued to invoke Spain at the expense of their other, erstwhile poster children for green-jobs schemes.

We’ll watch and see. But the rather belated effort this afternoon by Team Soros shows the best that the administration’s outside advocacy wing has managed to offer in response. It is also a tad amusing, given that Spain’s own Socialist government already bailed on Plan A of deny deny deny, affirming key findings in an assessment by the Ministry of Industry this week (OK, that’s not accurate: Plan A to these people is always ad hominem, so I mean Plan B). Apparently it wasn’t embarassing enough for Team Soros to have faced precisely that admission in Spain last week, mere days after the government first (once again, pridefully if ignorantly) denied the findings in a public statement issued at a “green jobs” confab in Chicago.

This intended rebuttal letter’s first line of argument is an ad hominem attack on the author. How unique, and such a departure for our friends.

The letter’s third and final counter-claim doesn’t even address the study. Instead, it asserts that “constructive debates should be about the future and not about the past.” I think that’s Spanish for “MoveOn” (since discussion of the facts at hand do not benefit our position).

Underwhelming stuff. Now, the letter’s second point is that renewables already account for 1 percent of Spanish employment and account for 20 percent of Spain’s electricity. I’ll have to circle back and check – just to provide our friends an example of how to proceed with claims, going forward – but let’s accept arguendo that’s right. You’ll notice that — whaddyaknow? — this doesn’t challenge the study in question’s findings either — that, taking these resources from the private sector to create to support these artificial jobs and expensive energy creates more unemployment than employment, and exports other jobs due to the power-reliability and other economic impacts.

It is axiomatic that such welfare, make-work schemes do find their way to accounting for a large portion of the employment in a country where unemployment is so high — presently at 17.5 percent, officially projected to hit 20.5 percent by the end of the year. Besides, at the rate these phony-baloney bubble-jobs are being lost, I’d wager that the green jobs will end up accounting for at least that large a segment of the unemployed, their government subsidies and mandates notwithstanding.

As a colleague of mine remarked, I wondered what took the Soros crowd et al so long to respond but, seeing the best that they could come up with is, now I know.