Yeah, it's often infuriating, but I think the underlying issues are important enough to be worth what it's doing to my blood pressure.

Re: the two party system, it's true that the two big political parties have managed to consolidate so much power that it's almost impossible for fresh ideas to seep in from outside, but sometimes insurgencies can take over, or at least shift the direction of the debate significantly. The Tea Party is certainly doing that nowadays, and, while the massive amount of GOP establishment coin they take in disqualifies them as a conventional insurgency, they've managed to make themselves a force to be reckoned with, possibly enough of a force that they could secure their own funding stream if the Koch Brothers and Pete Petersons of the world decided to cut them off.

It's a shame that this sort of thing has to happen by infiltrating one of the two parties, rather than forming new parties that can operate independently, but that's not changing until we adopt a preferential voting system, and I don't see that happening any time soon. So, for better or worse, the Tea Party probably provides a good strategy template for how to make change happen within the two party system. I don't know that the Democratic party would be as fertile a ground for this rapid change as the GOP was for the original Tea Party crowd, but it's certainly got a better chance of success than what's been tried before.

As for why I follow this stuff closely: politics matters, and the elections matter, even when they're a choice between "a douche and a turd sandwich" (thanks Trey and Matt.) Maybe the turd sandwich supports extending unemployment benefits! Maybe the douche promises unequivocally to close Guantanamo Bay! These issues matter to me, and being underinformed on them is a bad thing. The last time I stopped following politics, I ended up falling for Bush's justification for the Iraq war. I certainly wasn't the only left-leaning person on the planet to do so, but it's still something I'm deeply ashamed of, and the kind of thing I'm determined not to repeat.