Grande Gobierno: Obama Uses Feds to Protect His ‘Green Jobs’ Fantasy

by Christopher C. Horner

On numerous occasions, to tout his own agenda President Obama told America to “take a look at what’s happening in countries like Spain” to witness his model for a “green jobs” economy. Well, a team of Spaniards produced an academic study, officially of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, which revealed that Spain’s scheme has proven a disaster.

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In response, Obama’s administration provided a lesson in how Big Government can be abused when its officials are angered and embarrassed, turning its institutions on a private individual, even a foreign academic whose offense was to produce scholarly research about his own nation’s policy failures.

Here is what happened. The Spanish “green jobs” study received substantial play in the U.S. media and gained favorable attention in the Wall Street Journal’s U.S., Europe and Asia editions, among other outlets. It came up in a White House press conference, embarrassing spokesman Robert Gibbs who boasted how he disagreed with the study and its conclusions while admitting he had not read it.

The rest of administration’s three-fold response was in sum highly troubling. The benign second step was to substitute, without missing a beat, Denmark for Spain in Obama’s ritual “look at what’s happening in…” litany of our environmental superiors (though that experiment, too, has been defrocked). Then things got ugly.

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