Leave it to the Obama administration to keep trying to defend something the socialists in Spain have already admitted doesn’t work. Our gang here at home seems to have been slightly rattled by an academic study in Spain — a study that put the lie to that country’s claim to “green jobs” success. A U.S. governmental agency, the Department of Energy, has produced the “NREL Response to the Report Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources from King Juan Carlos University (Spain).” Really.

I’m just taking a first look at it now and have to run out to catch an airplane, but I see they fill out their few pages with headlines of rather weak and fairly ideological rhetoric. For example, “the report fails to account for technology export potential” (emphasis added) — right, it looked at what actually was and wasn’t. “The study ignores the role of government in facilitating growth of valued new industries” — that’s an ideological talking point, not an economic critique. “The comparison of [renewable-energy] jobs with average economy-wide metrics fails to recognize the variability within the modern economy” — says absolutely nothing.

These are three of the document’s four bulleted conclusions of claimed “Fundamental Limitations.”

The Obama “response” even takes the Spanish authors to task for limiting themselves to official data and not guessing about (what Obama might wish was) 2009 activity. Well, we know Spain’s unemployment’s now flirting with 20 percent, if that helps. The Obama response’s marquee complaint about the Spanish study’s assumptions is, “The authors assume that a dollar spent by the government is less efficient than a dollar spent by private industry and that it crowds out private investment.” Yeah. How outrageous to assume that. We’re supposed to ignore the economic consensus on how government spending crowds out private industry until some time after the health-care debate. (Did I mention a couple of government employees wrote this?)

I’m no doctor, but I diagnose a struck nerve. The self-medication of rationalization with Keynesian dogma is likely only to exacerbate the problem, leading the patient into a worse case of indignation, however righteous.

I can’t resist noting another problem: This contradicts not only their erstwhile hero Bill Clinton (according to the transcript and contemporaneous reporting, if not a sanitized version subsequently released); and even the president of Spain’s renewable-energy association, whose response was not about the substance but instead to call the study’s authors “unpatriotic” for having revealed their inconvenient findings; no, even better, the Obama administration has gone out of its way to contradict the regime of fellow socialist Zapatero, whose government’s study, well, affirmed the key conclusions of the paper in question, that Spain’s renewable schemes are threatening the electricity grid and the price of electricity, and that they produced a bubble.

Sorry, Team Soros, a “debunking” this ain’t. Keep trying. We’ll be here.