If Papandreou Doesn't Want U.S. Bailout Money, What Is He Doing in America...

...while his country is on the edge of total financial collapse?

Nemo has the best perspective on this:

Greece lied about their finances to join the Eurozone with a little help from your friendly neighborhood investment bankers. You might think that if you joined a club by falsifying your application, you would get kicked out, not bailed out. But you see, some of this bad Greek debt is on the books of Eurozone banks, and they cannot afford a second crisis at the moment because, let’s face it, the first one never really ended. As the old saying goes (apologies to J.P. Getty): If you owe Eurozone banks €100 million, that’s your problem; if you owe Eurozone banks €100 billion, that’s Angela Merkel’s problem.

So Merkel and Sarkozy want to bail out Greece, except they don’t because they would face riots in their own countries. (Well, not literally; Germans never riot because they’re German.) It is sort of funny. If France or Germany hands billions of Euros to Greece, their voters will go ballistic. But if the U.S. hands billions of dollars to the IMF and the IMF hands billions of dollars to Greece, Americans will not care, because who knows what the heck the IMF is and what it does, anyway? Americans are a wonderful people. If they understand what is happening, they will either panic or start shooting at you. So it is vitally important to make sure they always wander in a state of confusion long enough to run into a television set.