I don't disagree, but at the same time, by the nature of the system, people aren't capable of behaving in a way that rewards what they like. "Vote-signals," if you will, are as noisy as human communication is capable of being.
IMHO people are trying to hard too get what they "like", too often looking for a simple magic bullet, when they should be in a conversation with their elected officials about what tradeoffs are reasonable in light of our values. We should elect people who ask us to be uncomfortable at times, but for well-thought out reasons.
Our politicians are acting highly rationally, in the context of the incentives the voters offer. "Voting the bums out" is not going to change anything, until the voters opt to build a better kind of electorate. The first step is diagnosing the actual problem, rather simply believing that the problem is always Team Them.
I get what you're saying. Politics is a choice between the unpalatable and the disastrous. Duh. Of course the Eagles should just fly them there.
What Tolkein geeks and policy wonks alike force themselves to ignore in order to have these mine vs. yours logicality debates to begin with is that the premise of their debate is a fantasy world. "If we want blank, we should vote blank" tacitly assumes that voting blank and persuading others to vote blank can sway the outcome of an election. Any thinking individual can see immediately that this is untrue.