This clip of Bolton and John Stewart actually articulates the issue clearly.

Bolton is asserting, more or less, as a matter a faith, that if the President doesn’t act the way GWB has, then “what’s the point of having elections”, Stewart the opposite. A similar themewas echoed by Noel Francisco regarding the USA issue.

As a hypothetical example, (and it’s a deliberate caricature) suppose that each Republican administration appoints partisan hacks who trump up voter fraud charges against Democrats, and each Democrat administration appoints partisan hacks who deliberately refuse to pursue cases in which illegal immigrants vote Democratic.

In Bolton’s world (and Tom DeLay’s as well IIRC), voters can decide whether or not they like the priorities of each administration, and can boot them out. Hence *over time* you would expect alternating administrations with alternating priorities so that things would be a wash. In Stewart’s world, the idea is that an administration would try to moderate it’s behavior so that it’s base might never be happy, but a certain portion of its base might be moderately be more happy.

I would suspect that readers of TMV would, by definition, be more attracted to Jon Stewarts world, since policies would be more moderate and centrist most of the time, but more to the point, candidates from either party can choose to pursue more polarizing and ideological platforms or more centrist, inclusive platforms. I.e. the system theoretically offers not merely a choice between one polar alternative and another, but also choices which represents less extreme choices.

Having said all that, in many respects the U.S. two-party system offers far *less* choice than many multi-party states, but doesn’t have the sometimes crippling downside of consistently shifting fragile coalitions.

ROTFL

lol