The "because ___" construct has the nice effect of making the listener associate multiple connotations of the ___ word. So in the case of politics, it means "handwavy politics without explanation" and "because this is always the excuse" and "politics fucks everything up" and all the other things you associate with the term. Similary because aliens invokes what you said, since we know that aliens are just a lazy excuse commonly used, and also they are basically magical beings (in common vernacular) so anything can be attributed to them (like fairies).
The way I read the construct, which the article touches on, is as shorthand to refer to universal properties of a subject that both the writer and the reader understand. "Because politics" = "because politics usually results in stupid outcomes", "because bacon" = "because bacon is delicious and should be in everything", "because racecar" = "because racecars throw out the rules of what you would expect in a regular car", etc. Used this way it becomes self-referrential as an obvious explanation - "of course talks failed, politics was involved". "Of course I put bacon, bacon is delicious". "Of course there's no interior, it's a race car".
Of course, different people may read different implied properties based on their own views, that may not be the same as what the writer had in mind...
The grammatical failure is the kind that would happen in speech, when the speaker suddenly realizes he's bit off more than he can chew, and truncates his explanation with a pause, a word, a shrug, and a rueful smile. "because, you know... politics."
Well, no. It actually alludes to the fact that politics was the hand-wavy excuse used to describe why the talks failed.
It goes back to "X happened because aliens." As in, we can't explain why it happened, therefore we'll just say it was aliens that did it.