This business of seeing American debt in the mirror of the Greek debt crisis is the new distortion:

Despite last year's bailout, debt in Greece continues to grow, and Athens is asking for another rescue package. As America nears the deadline to raise its debt ceiling, it should review its Greek lessons.
Greece is in deep debt problems not because of its debts but because it's a small and weak country. The US is not in anyway the same species of debtor as Greece. One can bully; the other cannot; one has "the bomb," the other doesn't. To act as if US and Greece are the same type of debtors is to pretend as if their access to violence is the same.

If the Pentagon suddenly collapsed, only then would we see a real change in how American debt is viewed. So, the comparison between Greece and US serves just one purpose: to protect the American rich from taxes by cutting the government's remaining, non-violent social commitments.

The Greek debt problem, on the other hand, reveals a truth: A nationality (the EU in this case) cannot be realized by market forces alone. The EU will never be a US because the US is not the dollar first. This line of thought is in development; I will have more to say about the euro and European nationality in the future.