I see that the Obama administraton has enlisted Canadian politicians to come down south and defend the health-care system that Canadians flee when the going gets rough and treatment needs to get going. You see, pointing out how state-run medicine really works seems to have turned some Americans off on the idea. The message is an odd one: their system’s survival depends on the U.S. adopting something similar. With friends like those . . .

A better admission against interest I could not imagine, but it strikes me as eerily similar to what’s going on in Spain, with the (renewed) campaign against Dr. Gabriel Calzada, whose exposé of that country’s green-jobs debacle led the head of the renewable-energy association there to call Calzada unpatriotic for letting the cat out of the bag. As with Canada’s foray into health-care socialism, it seems that Spain’s system faces collapse unless we fall for the same thing and bail them out. In this case, what they hope for is our providing a massive market for the Potemkin industry they’ve created, at least those 10 percent of the jobs that involve manufacturing the equipment.

That is, they hope we adopt Obama’s agenda and, er, put Spaniards back to work at those “jobs that cannot be exported” from the U.S.

Don’t ask. Must be the new math.

But speaking of the renewed campaign against the troubling findings on green jobs: it has taken a turn for the worse, with a regrettable escalation that bodes very poorly for the state.

Calzada and his team wisely ignored snipes from the state’s surrogates for weeks, which made sense for reasons other than that the attacks were largely ad hominem and not substantive. The Socialist Zapatero government couldn’t control itself, and turned their embarassment into shame late last week by making it the government against Calzada.

They came out and attacked the study. Rather amusingly, their line is to claim it is more “ideological” than academic, which is strange as it’s the first academic effort to assess what the politicians and their charges have been saying. Translated, that means that it does not fit the mold of what they’ve come to expect from state-subsidized university studies. Adding further confusion, the government is defending a study done by a trade union linked to the Communist Party and another study ordered by the Enterpreneurial Wind Association (AEE). It seems that those should be considered sufficiently disinterested academic inquiry. Mmm. Yes.

In short:

– The minister of industry is coordinating with the renewables associations, environmentalist pressure groups, et al., to counter-attack.

– The renewables industry says the minister considers the study indignant.

– The unpatriotic charge (the authors are harming the country by mentioning these findings) is back.

– They are trying to personalize matters, to avoid mentioning it is a university study, as in “the Calzada report”, “Calzada says”, etc. (Ok, anyone . . . what’s Spanish for “car starter” and “food taster”?)

– As a result, the debate has now become known to the whole country.

The effort to recruit professors from Calzada’s department at Madrid’s King Juan Carlos University to sign on to a letter assailing him was a failure –part of a broader effort to pressure the school and its outside supporters not to renew his employment contract. Not that he struck a nerve or anything.

Some fun things are in the works and we’ll keep you posted. But it’s fair to say that the battle is now joined and the government misstepped by answering. It is now fairly well understood that the state recognizes the risk that the study’s findings might persuade the U.S. not to follow the same model (meaning that these Spanish companies might not get any U.S. taxpayer money).

So, yes, let’s continue learning from our more advanced social democrat types around the world, paying heed to all that they tell us, in word and deed. If we pay close enough attention, our freedoms such as they presently stand might remain largely intact.