[caoilte]

They haven't been "playing the dumb communist" they've been smeared with it by their own media, by strategic "leaks" from EuroGroup meetings by "analysts" in International Finance and by the International Media which largely swallowed the smears time after time.

Not that they don't make mistakes. The problem is that they are not held to the same standards as members of the EuroGroup and Parliament. It ought to be fine for Varoufakis to talk about issuing IOUs, for the same reason that it is fine for the head of the European Parliament to say that Greece should be expelled from the Euro if it voted no.

There is an asymmetry of power. The EU holds the purse strings and so Greece cannot complain, whatever they do. Greece needs a bailout and so any mistake that its leaders make will be used as a bargaining chip against them. You see the same relationship in negotiations between Iran and the P5+1, between Hamas and the Quartet and between every black man on the street in America and any policeman that they meet.